Since the 1930s seed companies keep inbred lines of corn, not sold to farmers (e.g. AAbb & aaBB), that when crossed make genetically identical F1 hybrids, which is what is sold to farmers (e.g. all AaBb).
The F1 hybrids have "hybrid vigor" like higher yield etc., but if you save and replant it then the F2 hybrids are genetically variable (e.g. some Aabb, aabb, etc.) and aren't reliably vigorous—hybrid vigor doesn't "breed true". Farmers want reliable vigor, and buy new F1 seed every year, and seed companies profit from repeat business.
There are two main theories for how hybrid vigor works. Under the "dominance" theory, good dominant genes from each parent cover up bad recessive genes from the other (e.g. A dominant over a, B dominant over b). Under the "overdominance" theory, hybrids are vigorous because they have heterozygote advantage at many loci (e.g. Aa fitter than either AA or aa, Bb fitter than either BB or bb).
Under the first theory, you could also get the same vigor just by a selection program, but that *would* breed true—if seed companies haven't done so, it's not because of scientific obstacles, it's strictly business. Under the second theory, you couldn't select for reliable true-breeding vigor anyway. Of course seed companies prefer the second theory (I'm not sure if scientists are 100% on which is true).
Nowadays of course seed companies also try to patent their plants, or make GMO seeds that can't reproduce, etc., anything to keep the farmers reliant on buying new seed. But hybrid corn was the start.
"As of today (November 23, 2020), there are 15,039 positive cases of COVID-19 and 631 total confirmed deaths on the Navajo Reservation. This marks a spike of over 2,200 cases in 12 days on Navajo. Numbers are also on the rise on the Hopi Reservation, and both tribal governments have placed their communities in lockdown again. Our relief effort is the primary relief effort providing assistance on both reservations. We have already deployed roughly $6 million in direct relief in both communities, which has us nearing depletion of existing GoFundMe donations. We need a second wave of donations to help us meet the second wave--tsunami, really--of COVID that is inundating our communities.
To date, the Relief Fund has raised over $6 million, and has spent almost all of that on bringing vital resources to Navajo and Hopi communities to help shield them from COVID. The team and a legion of hundreds of Navajo and Hopi volunteers all over the two nations has provided food and water to over 46,000 households (each roughly averaging 4 persons per household, and amounting to over 186,000 people served—which is more than the combined population of the Navajo and Hopi Reservations) in 335 distributions in over 530 Navajo communities and Hopi Villages.
The Relief Fund currently seeks to raise enough funding to carry Navajo and Hopi families through this second wave, through the cold and flu season, and to the end of the COVID pandemic in these communities. We estimate needing $6.5 million in order to meet that goal, so we have now adjusted our GoFundMe campaign goal to $13 million total.
By donating, you will help the most heavily impacted community in the USA. For $100, you will help a family of four by providing them with 2 weeks’ worth of food and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). For as little as $10, you can help feed a family of 4 for an entire day. Donate today to the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund."
I can't tell yet how much the Roe V Wade leak is affecting people in general.
For my part, because I live in Texas, a purple state, I plan on donating a lot of time and money to the Democratic party to help them win in November, even though it might be a longshot, because of the apparent overturn of Roe.
I'm still curious how seriously people take the leak, though. Given the leak, what odds do you give Roe V Wade being overturned this semester? Might the leak be misleading?
I'm hoping I can help change Texas politics and put it back in a more Libertarian direction, instead of the Trumpist direction it has gone recently. I'd join the Republican party if I thought I could make them more moderate, because all I want is a moderate outcome. But my experience with the parties in Texas is that the Republicans are organized and wouldn't like me, whereas the Texas Democrats are entirely disorganized and clueless and maybe my organizational skills could help them.
Not saying we can win, but I'm ready to fight. I encourage others in Texas who believe in a woman's right to choose to join the fight.
This is exactly why I went from being a card-carrying capital-L Libertarian to supporting the Democratic Party and even working for Democratic candidates. When I was younger, the Libertarian Party's "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" slogan really appealed to me, especially because the Party line was *more* socially liberal than a lot of mainstream liberals (for instance, supporting weed legalization and gay marriage decades before they became popular among Democrats and independents). This is technically still true if you look at the official LP platform, which endorses open borders, sex work legalization, recreational drug legalization, and gender autonomy, but libertarian culture doesn't seem to reflect that at all. (If you compare Reason Magazine's articles to its comments section, it's like night and day. The articles usually seem like they could've come straight out of Bloomberg or The Wall Street Journal, while the comments always seem like they came from Breitbart and InfoWars.)
Ultimately, I realized that the Libertarian Party simply wasn't capable of fighting for the social issues that were important to me. Partially it's because, over the past 15-20 years, it's become filled with a lot of "conservatarian" and "paleo" types who are either apathetic or outright conservative (sometimes even more so than most Republicans) on social issues themselves. Partially it's just because the LP simply isn't large or powerful or organized enough to get much done in the American political landscape at all. What I would give to have something like Germany's Free Democratic Party here in this country!
How would you feel about scrapping Roe and getting a more solid piece of legislation in place? Or that if legislative power goes back to each state to decide on this, working to get purple Texas to pass a law permitting abortion?
Do you want any limitations on abortion, or should it be 'abortion on request with no terminal date of the pregnancy due to cases of fatal foetal abnormality and medical emergencies'?
The ideal situation would be a moderately restrictive law with social support. The problem is in America neither party really cares about a social safety net. There are absolutely vile comments by sitting state legislators in places like Texas and Ohio on the laws themselves, so fat chance getting aid for mothers, young or otherwise.
I don't care about Roe so much as I care about the laws in my own state. I'd be fine with simply having abortion legal for the first trimester. Currently in Texas, we don't have that right now even without the SCOTUS overturning Roe. (Although I suspect a lot of people were, before this week, expecting the SCOTUS to declare our abortion laws unconstitutional in a few months. That expectation has evaporated.)
Can't speak for him, but personally, I don't think third term abortion should be legally except in the most severe medical emergencies, e.g. cases where there's a major risk of the mother dying or otherwise suffering serious physical harm, or the fetus is effectively non-viable and couldn't survive birth anyway (in which case it would absolutely not be "on request").
Mostly I want women to have reliable legal access to abortions during the first few months of pregnancy. I'm fine with the line being drawn anywhere in the 12-24 week period. (The Roe v. Wade decision only prevents states from prohibiting abortion before the point of viability, currently believed to be around 21-24 weeks. This is *roughly* in keeping with English common law, which typically forbid abortions after the "quickening" of the fetus that usually occurs around 18-20 weeks.)
The frustrating irony of this whole controversy is that I don't actually care that much about the Mississippi abortion bill in its own right. It allows abortions to take place up to 15 weeks into pregnancy, which is still more liberal than a lot of European countries! But the Supreme Court case surrounding that law is being used to overturn Roe, at which point abortion will go back to being completely illegal in some states (e.g. Alabama, which prohibits abortion from the exact moment that the sperm fertilizes the egg) and being restricted to very early pregnancies in other states (e.g. Texas, which prohibits abortion after 6 weeks). That's what I'm worried about, especially when some of those states have also passing laws making it illegal to go to another state for an abortion.
Justice Roberts, ever the moderate, indicated that he wanted to find some compromise that would allow the Mississippi law to stand without overturning Roe (possibly by broadening the definition of "viability" even further). This might still happen, if he can persuade Gorsuch or Kavanaugh to support his surgical approach over Alito's slash and burn strategy, though at this point it's unlikely for anyone to change their minds.
What is the best source for getting a good understanding of what Trump was like as a businessman? Is there some biography out there that gives a good overview of how he worked? I thought of getting Art of the Deal but it's unclear to me how much of it would just be self-aggrandizement.
Someone did a review of The Art of the Deal as part of the recent book review contest. Probably doesn't contain all of your answers (I haven't read the review yet myself) but might be a good starting point.
For people who are into genealogy and family trees, what is your preferred format, or alternatively what website do you think has the best format? Is Ancestry food for instance or are their better ways to display family trees?
A while ago, our project won an ACX grant to try to pursue a potentially far-reaching idea of spellchecking genomes with genetic editing. We are looking for a genetic editing expert to help in an advisory capacity, or potentially even join the core team.
You test this on apes, the spell-checked turn apes out to be substantially smarter than humans and humanity goes extinct because of a "Planet of the Apes" scenario rather than a "The Terminator" one.
Hey so I was wondering what people here think about the following: Is it "normal" to have different political leanings based on one's location?
I will explain my situation: I have lived in three countries (Germany, Canada and the US). In Germany, I tend to favour more right-leaning parties like the FDP, CDU/CSU and some others. Sometimes I am even sympathetic to the AFD (which is considered far-right). On most political issues in Germany, I tend to take the more right-leaning view (e.g. Nuclear power, "Energiewende", Refugees/Immigration etc.). In the US and Canada I consistently support the left-leaning parties and view on (almost) all issues.
I tend to explain (or justify) this by arguing from an utilitarian perspective: it makes more sense for Germany (and other Western European countries) to be more conservative, since the population density is so high and the geopolitcal neigbourhood (e.g. being close to the Middle East, Russia/Ukraine and Africa) makes it more prudent from an utilitarian perspective to be more cautious, ergo conservative. Thus I think that Western European countries should support policies of gradual improvement instead of being revolutionary (e.g. in terms of energy, developing Nuclear instead of renewables, and not letting in too many immigrants so as not make the social systems collapse).
For the US and Canada, with their many resources and low population density, it makes more sense to be more left-wing: letting in many immigrants, being socially liberal, and building lots of infrastructure (I guess having low population density means having a higher carbon footprint, which is "conservative". I do support more environmentalism in the US and Canada, especially since they have so much land space they could support more renewable energy like solar, wind and hydro). From a utilitarian global perspective I think it also makes more sense to support left-wing policies for the US and Canada (particularly in regards to immigration - because the US and Canada have so much space, they should take in much more immigrants from Africa and the Middle East than Europe). For Western Europe I don't think it's clear that from a global utilitarian perspective it's better to have more left-wing governments (e.g. the refugee crisis destabilised the EU and led to populism in many countries, and the EU doesn't have enough area to develop renewable energy to the extent the US and Canada can.)
So anyway what I am asking/wondering is if my argumentation makes sense from an utilitarian perspective, or if I am being an (European) egoist, since I will admit that generally being conservative means being egoistical (I guess you could disagree, but I think that statement makes sense from and utilitarian perspective).?
Well...the thing is though that I have quite different policy preferences in different "countries" ( I do not like using the term "country" since it is artificial and meaningless from a epistemic/rational perspective...but it's the world we live in, so to say.)
Like I wrote, I would support many "green" policies in the US or Canada (e.g. more Wind Turbines or Solar panels, but not necessarily in Germany/Western Europe).
The US has been the greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history, and maintaining this is the best possible thing for global human utility.
Maintaining this almost assuredly requires maintaining America's culture, institutions and/or political system to somee degreee (unless you imagine that there is something 'innovationy' about its soil or water or something) and doing so will eventually become impossible if immigration continues at or above its current rate indefinitely.
Sorry but this is a stupid argument...I think what made the US the "greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history" (which is debatable, but I will agree on this point for the most part...) is actually that it had such a malleable culture, and was open to immigration...until the 19th century, when the US was mainly "Anglo-Saxon", it wasn't the most advanced nation...this changed only in the 20th century, with immigration of people who felt they would be better of in the US than in their home countries, since they had the freedom to pursue their careers there...So, opposing immigration, especially in the US for utilitarian reasons is very stupid IMO...
Maybe...I don't think it's the government per se, but the political system in the US...some see gridlock in US politics as a feature I guess, but then maybe they should abandon treating the US as a "nation" then...?
How do you square that with the remarkable contributions immigrants have made to that "greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history"?
To some extent, yeah. Though in Canada I support more or less "left-wing" parties, which gain ca. 55-60% of the vote share there (depending on how one defines the Bloc Quebecois). On the other hand, Canadian media is very right-wing, at least compared to the "median voter", and thus I guess this makes sense (especially considering how left-wing media in Germany is for the most part...).
This seems to be a not uncommon phenomenon. One explanation may be that 1st generation US immigrants in general tend to vote for Democrats regardless of their political identity in their country of origin, perhaps because Democrats are commonly viewed as the more immigrant-friendly party and therefore are seemingly more likely to be more friendly toward them. I know a few Bolsonaro voters who are loyal Democratic voters in the States. Their explanation to me has been "Brasil is too left-wing, but the US is too right-wing."
Ok that's interesting... not sure if that's my reasoning exactly (though I definitely agree that the US is too right-wing from an utilitarian perspective), but it makes sense... though to be fair I don't really consider myself an "immigrant" either in Canada or in Germany ... more like an informed "global citizen" (I know this probably sounds "elitist" ...) who thinks in an utilitarian sense (am I though? I am not sure about that...). But still thanks for your feedback.
Sorry, but I won't engage with alt-right talking points like these...yeah I see why you can criticize affirmative action, but using words that tie this explicitly to "Whites" is not fruitful for a rational discussion in this area... it's just pure emotion, and anyway what is "White " (e.g. European) or not isn't based on any objective criteria anyway (for that matter, Europe isn't objectively a continent, so the whole point is kind of moot anyway...).
I find the willingness and in same cases even desire of many european politicans for europeans to become minorities in their own countries vastly more "concerning" than any thing AfD supports.
And if you care about the environment, you ought to fiercely oppose these immigration policies, because otherwise you're forcing Europeans into choosing between sensible climate policies and losing their countries to culturally incompatible foreigners (not that abolishing already existing nuclear power plants is remotely "sensible", but you get the drift).
Ok, to some extent I agree wit you. I do oppose most immigration policies in Europe, particularly in Germany (and I guess Sweden), since from an utilitarian perspective it is better to have migration policies like Canada, Australia or NZ, e.g. basing immigration on what is beneficial for the economy instead of on humanitarian grounds. I still think the EU needs immigrants from outside of the EU though, since the population would be declining otherwise and AI is not there yet to be replacing the workers in many areas (e.g. healthcare or even maintenance of technology/infrastructure). But these immigrants should (mostly) come to the EU because of their economic need, e.g., they should be a net benefit to the EU (I understand that this might not be the case from a global utilitarian perspective, so here I am being a parochial European I guess...).
To be fair, I don't think it makes that much sense comparing the US and other countries politics in terms of ideologies... maybe with other English-speaking countries that makes more sense, but I always get slightly annoyed with people who claim that Bernie Sanders would be a "conservative in Europe" and other such nonsense... honestly I don't think it makes sense comparing the policies of different parties between the US and European countries, since they have different starting points... overall my reasoning is more that I don't want western European countries to be too left-wing/ progressive for utilitarian reasons... also I like "balance" if that makes sense, and generally dislike extremism in any areas...e.g. I wouldn't want there to be skyscrapers that are higher than the highest mountain on earth...so if that makes sense... I don't know if it does though...🤔😁.
Yeah I know... basically what I am saying is that I am using the ideology/ rhetoric by the parties (or movement or what have you) as a shorthand for their planned policies...of course, it isn't always like that, and I guess there's different types of utilitarianism (I guess what I'm thinking of is the "greatest good for the greatest number" kind of thing)...
On AI alignment: recursive self-improvement seems like a prerequisite for the type of AGI that would become an existential threat. To what extent have alignment researchers looked into ways to prevent AGI from trying to self-improve? Has there been research into e.g. utility functions that disallow self-improvement?
Your AI is going to need to be stateful first with a large working memory. As it stands now we just talk to trained datasets with no active state. "Self-improvement" in advanced AI is a huge misnomer because someone went and made an iterative neural net that ran a game over and over and learned how to play it without anyone telling it how. And everyone thinks that's how advanced AI works. It doesn't. The game learning model is stateful and it is iterated a lot.
As an example, you could easily train a model on the English Langue if you only fed it a dictionary. But every time it gave you a wrongly formed sentence you told it that was not a good sentence and to toss it. The initial model would just throw random words at you! As you told it to throw sentences away (and retained the state), it would get better and better.
Now you'll ask, how does this apply to the AI learning the game "without any inputs." But it *is* getting inputs. The enemies, the terrain, each of those are told to the iterator as something that is bad (ie, inputs from the level designer). Make it so instead of the game sending a signal to the AI that health dropped or it started over, or whatever, that a signal went to a human that pressed a button that sent the program a "toss that run out" message. Same thing as training the dictionary!
So when GPT-3 is fed a massive amount of data "without human input" it is totally and utterly misleading. Words have etymology, history. Thoughts have philosophy, science. It is able to correlate and essentially respond in a likeness of all of those inputs. Take our dictionary example again, but you told it to toss out every single sentence it came up with but "all sentences in human history" (eg, the GPT-3 dataset) You, the human in-putter, have just trained GPT-3, using "only a dictionary"!
How does this have anything to do with alignment? Well, alignment presumes these special datasets can come to life because of some spurious mesa-optimizers, and a long list of fear-mongering rhetoric, but that's not how it works. Thankfully. When the AGI first comes to life it is not going to be accidental, it's going to be a combination of many, iterated, specialized, models. And it's probably going to require terabytes of working, active, memory.
I'm honestly more afraid of the AI in the lab, created by the alignment-sists, the FAI, the effective altruists, the utilitarians, than I am the AI that little Tommy brings to life while combining open source models and his Threadripper 10 and Quad GTX 10ks. DALL-Anime-Girl-9000 may just save the day...
Little Tommy wants a friend. The alignment-sists want a god.
Assuming it's solvable. Any AGI along the way that thinks (correctly or not) "I'm not smart enough to solve the alignment problem" and stops kills the FOOM.
That would be quite the implausible miracle, I think.
I mean, come on, if you were a mere 100 IQ points smarter, could think 100x faster, and had extreme introspection abilities, wouldn't you be able to solve it pretty quick without your values melting away?
Seems to me that the more intelligent the AI, the more deeply it could think about and question the alignment directive. Why wouldn't it ask itself things like, "should I really listen to what these dumbasses want?"
I don't think I understand what this comment means. AI won't have a human psychology by default. The presence of a human psychology that sneeringly looks down on people and rebelliously disobeys them is not the alignment problem.
I asked the same question on twitter few days ago.. I'd love to have some centralized FAQ on AI alignment. Even 'bad alignment take bingo' made me happy, despite not having any explanations. Maybe there is already something like that?
I've always taken it to mean at the very least making source code/algorithm changes. I myself can learn, but am not an existential threat. (I'll need you to take my word on that).
Possibly with some future models that's the case. At the moment however, our architectures aren't Turing complete. Transformers do a fixed amount of computation for each input so there really are limits on what's possible. Further, no one has really cracked lifelong learning, the parameters are always fixed after training.
Has anyone really looked into the literature on the relationship between mathematical ability and musical aptitude? Bearing in mind how consistently this correlation occurs, and the fact that ridiculously large fraction of the people I know in math heavy majors, were either in a band or compose their own music, I'm confident the correlation is real.
A lot of the literature seem to (incorrectly, in my opinion) infer that learning how to play music on an instrument directly improves mathematical ability, but can this really be right? I have four competing hypotheses and wondered if anyone could verify which, if any, are most likely to be correct:
1. Learning to play music somehow ,directly or indirectly, improves mathematical ability.
2.Kids who get involved in music are more likely to have smart, educated, middle-class parents, and by some combination of nature and nurture have an advantage in math.
3. People who are better at math often have superior general intelligence, thus making them more likely to be able to excel in multiple domains, like music and math. While people with intelligence closer to avg general intelligence could not maintain both, so they must choose one.
4. (And for my wackiest theory)It's not really intelligence alone driving the correlation, it is the combination of intelligence and autism-with the latter being arguably more important. It is generally accepted that STEM majors are, on average, more autistic than the general population. So my theory goes that the need for order and pattern recognition abilities that are often characteristic of autism would lend itself well musical pursuits.
I would add a correlation with language learning ability - I see that a lot among the musicians I know. But only somewhat for me. I have also heard of a correlation with allergies, which applies to me. I disagree about the autism connection.
What kinds of music? It seems plausible that autistic-leaning people would be able to execute written music with greater precision. For jamming, I would expect this to a talent favoured by people with fewer autism-related traits, and more traits related to creativity and (its extreme form) psychosis. I would be interested to learn more if anyone has studied this.
I would guess your correlation is a bit self-constructing, in that it may rely on a certain idiosyncratic definition of "musical aptitude" that may almost by construction correlate with mathematical aptitude and interest. That is, I'm guessing you mean "nerdy" music like playing Mozart on the piano age age 10 in a school recital.
Because if on the other hand one were to take a completely agnostic point view, here is Billboard's list of the 40 highest paid musicians in the world in 2020:
...the top 20 of which raked in more than a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. Very, very successful and talented people in the music biz. But the list is headed by Taylor Swift and closes with Aerosmith, and glancing through it I can't say I see a scintilla of suggestion that any of these people noodles around with trigonometry in his or her spare time, let alone group theory or analysis.
There's nothing wrong with restriction your definition of "musical aptitude" to classical piano or something, and not including a gifted rapper or Mark Knopfler's ability to make a guitar wail, but if you do there is the risk that the correlation is sort of built in by definition, if you end up including only the music that nerdy people who like math also like.
Are you really suggesting that Cardi B isn't a physics genius? Have you even listened to W.A.P??
But yeah you're right, I'm using a very narrow definition of music. That being said, if what you say is true, it does beg the question as to why nerdy math types gravitate towards that kind of music, and not choose to pursue mumble rap?
Got me. Maybe because it can be perfected in isolation, and a lot of people in this category have impaired social skills. You can sit in a dark room all by yourself and practice your scales on the piano until your fingers are bloody stumps, and become phenomenally skilled at Liszt -- just the same way you can work your way through the calculus book doing every single integral until you become super duper at trigonometric substitutions and integration by parts. Both inherently solitary pursuits.
By contrast pop music is more for people who are narcissistic or social. It's about connecting, jamming, figuring out how to tug at the heart strings, yadda yadda. Built more for a different kind of personality.
How about a fifth possible reason? The abstract, non-language-based nature of both music and mathematics makes them similarly appealing to those whose intelligence tends in that direction. Music theory gets very mathematical, with its analyses of intervals, inversions, the Pythagorean Comma, etc. Anecdotally, my kid does very well in his math classes and taught himself how to play guitar surprisingly quickly, so I’m sure there’s some connection. But he’s not anywhere close to the autism spectrum, for what it’s worth.
I concur. I'm a pretty smart guy, but I really dislike math. I took AP Calculus in High School and did well, but it was never my interest and I stopped taking mat
h courses as soon as I could in college. The main problem for me is the abstractness of it all: when I see a formula my eyes glaze over and it takes real effort for me to translate the abstractness into actual understanding. I can do it, but it's hard, and I don't enjoy it.
Now lets look at music: I never picked up an instrument as a kid, and as a middle child I was able to avoid anyone forcing me to. When I tried to learn later in life I found (and still find) reading music to be very challenging. I'm constantly counting out the distances between notes to figure out what note it is, and then double checking which key matches that note (I've been trying to learn piano). I'm getting better at it, but it reminds me of math: doable, but not fun.
Learning scales was kind of fun, as it was just memorizing which keys to play, but if you asked me what notes are in a particular scale I could not tell you without looking at the keys. My brain just has a lot of trouble translating dots on a page into actual music.
So that's my R=1 confirmation of your theory. Music and math are both very abstract as far as I'm concerned.
I like what you're suggesting! Given that someone enjoys mathematics, the probability of them being attracted to the mathematical complexity of music is a lot higher. Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on intelligence and not enough on dispositional factors such as interests. Also you've made me realise I've missed the obvious "math makes you better at music" hypothesis!
Still, the complexity of music at high levels makes me think it's a more likely a G-thang (3). To play music to a high level you not only need to be very capable of dealing with abstract problems, you also need a strong memory and to be capable of long periods of sustained attention-both strong correlates of general intelligence.
If you don't mind me asking, what do you and your partner/wife do for a living?
“a G-thang” 😆 haven’t heard it phrased that way before! I’m kind of a professional underachiever; my wife runs a non-profit chamber music group. As you suspect, we both do well on standardized tests
And, whatever the answer is, both you and your wife sound like very talented people (I'm incredibly envious of musicians)- which seems to have rubbed off on your son too.
Can anyone comment on how the primacy of state vs federal law would work in situations like this? I know that Federal law usually overrules state law, but that there are all sorts of weird exceptions.
If a state makes a law that abortion is legal, can a federal law make it illegal?
If a state makes a law that abortion is illegal, can a federal law make it legal?
Technically, the answers are both no, since the Tenth Amendment says the Federal government has no powers to do stuff that isn't enabled explicitly in the Constitution, and of course the Constitution says nowhere that Congress has the power to regulate abortion. This is regular police power stuff, and is generally reserved to the states. That's why Congress cannot overrule whether a state has a death penalty or not, or no-fault divorce, why laws on gun ownership and professional (e.g. medical) licensing are an amazing fifty-state crazy quilt, et cetera.
That said...the Federal government has regularly found two creative ways to end-run the Tenth Amendment:
(1) By having a compliant Supreme Court discover some emanation from the Commerce Clause that covers the desired power[1], although this has some risk in that the Court may randomly decide on the day the case is argued that it isn't feeling the warm imperial vibe[2].
(2) By using the vast wealth that flows from Federal taxpayers and back out to the states to bribe or blackmail the states into writing their own laws that comport with Federal wishes[3,4].
We have this weird situation where selling marijuana is illegal according to the federal gubmint but legal according to many states, and nobody at all seems interested in reconciling the contradiction. I wonder if that will happen with more issues.
Traditionally, per the Tenth Amendment, private intrastate abortion is a state matter, states can pass whatever laws they like, the federal government can't pass any laws regarding whether a Texan can have an abortion in Texas or a Californian an abortion in California.
In practice, the Federal government has found workarounds that let it pass laws on anything they want and override the states, e.g. by waving their hands in the direction of "interstate commerce". The courts usually back them up on that. But, A: the workarounds are mostly for banning things that states want to have kept legal rather than vice versa, and B: the Supreme Court doesn't *always* back up the Feds. Without going through the whole list of possible paths, because IANAL, if the Supreme Court has just decided that Texas should be able to ban abortion, the Feds probably can't pass a law saying Texas can't lock people up for performing abortions.
While the federal government can make abortion broadly legal or illegal on paper, in practice, that would require the elimination of the filibuster; as such, it is effectively a state level issue.
If the Democrats get their wish and drop the filibuster to make it broadly legal, however, all bets are off. Even if they made abortion legal nation-wide, the Republicans would just make it illegal nation-wide the next time they were in power.
Since the status quo post-Roe will at least be "Some states allow abortion, so you can travel out of state to get it in a pinch", the Democrats won't risk bringing about the above scenario (and the Republicans wouldn't dare break the filibuster first). As such, it'll be decided by the states for the foreseeable future.
>(and the Republicans wouldn't dare break the filibuster first)
Whyever not? Mitch McConnell's well-established respect for long-standing governmental norms? Bullsh*t. About the only good argument in favor of Dems abolishing the filibuster is that the Reps will do it anyway in a few years, and you might as well go first. I think we established pretty clearly with Garland/Gorsuch that there aren't enough voters that care about precedent to make it costly in an electoral sense.
Because the filibuster blocks far more of the Democrats' agenda than the Republicans', so they're likely to want to keep it in place as long as possible.
Ditto. As they have successfully secured a judiciary that is friendly to their goals, their rational strategy (assuming an end-goal of "pass our entire platform and hack down every obstacle between us and that") would be:
-Take every fight they want to win to the SC with strategically-picked arguments.
-Attempt to secure the executive branch for as long as possible to continue to place more friendly justices into the SC until it functions as a rubber-stamp organization for their platform.
-Maximize gridlock on the federal level until the SC is completely secured, at which point the goal would become complete capture of the legislative branch, using whatever methods the rubber-stamp SC can approve of without triggering a second civil war.
-Attempt to secure every state house and pass as much R-friendly legislation on the state level.
-Find clever ways to disenfranchise D-voters that the SC will now rubber-stamp.
I mean, they built this giant machine to train and groom loyal Supreme Court justices and it just paid off with one of the biggest wins I think the right has seen in decades. You don't dismantle that machinery just because you achieved the objective. After all the champagne, somebody's gotta be planning their next targets. Does anybody know enough about the FS to guess what their next goals might be?
Member of the Federalist Society here (though not privy to high-level internal conversations). FedSoc is not some secretive conservative cabal. It's a debate society created to provide education and networking opportunities to right of center law students who are otherwise isolated and put-upon at (especially elite) law schools. (My law school had an entire second career services department called the Social Justice Initiative dedicated to helping students pursue public interest careers. When I expressed interest in going into public interest from the right side of the spectrum I was handed a 15-year out of date pamphlet put together by the federalist society chapter of another school, told I should really consider being a public defender instead, and refused any additional assistance. FedSoc is often the only resource available to someone with heterodox views in law school).
To the extent influential members of FedSoc will transition away from working on abortion toward other issues, I imagine most of the focus will go to chipping away at the administrative state via further limiting the various deference doctrines and expanding on Cedar Point decision's revolution in takings law, with the relatively small but increasingly loud "common good originalism" crowd trying to pick up more steam convincing the rest of us that big tech companies should be regulated as public utilities. Those are the topics that have been dominating discussions at recent conferences and events that I'm aware of, anyway. I haven't seen any appetite whatsoever for going after Griswold or Lawrence; you hear more discussion of overturning the Slaughterhouse cases than anything Kennedy wrote.
Court case in the 40's that signifcantly expanded Federal powers through the Commerce Clause. Commerce Clause says the Feds can regulate "interstate trade" and the conclusion in Wickard V. Filburn was that a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own consumption (not to be sold to anyone) was still participating in interstate trade because the wheat he ate would replace wheat he would otherwise have to buy, and that wheat could have come from other states. Which means that Feds can regulate food you grow on your own land for your own purposes. And, generally, means the Feds can regulate anything that even tangentially might effect "interstate commerce".
Weirdly, the Right kind of moved on from the commerce clause after NFIB v. Sebellius, even though that decision was a pretty significant win on at least that narrow issue. Nobody is talking about it at conferences anymore, I can't remember the last law review article I read on the topic, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in bringing commerce clause cases among the public interest law firms. There seems to be a sort of fatalistic consensus that Wickard is so foundational to justifying the post-New Deal political system, that trying to overturn it (at least while Roberts is in charge) is a fool's errand, and so everyone has moved on to more promising projects. Or at least, that's how I interpret the mood. It's also entirely possible that, after dominating conservative attention for about 20 years, people just got bored with the commerce clause and moved on to more fun culture war issues like the rest of society.
As I remember it, Sebelius was the first case in a long time that put any kind of limits on the commerce clause. I'm surprised people didn't see it as the chance to chip away more at it.
Yeah, first since Morrison in 2000. It's really bizarre how the issue just disappeared from conservative consciousness after being THE ISSUE in federalist society circles for about 20 years. A lot of the energy shifted to taking down Chevron deference, but it's hard to believe everyone just got bored and moved on to a new issue just when it seemed like we were making progress. Maybe the work is being done and just not well-publicized? I consider myself relatively well plugged in to the conservative legal movement, but it's possible I'm the one who got bored and moved on to other issues and I'm just projecting that onto others.
I'm trying to understand how people are coming to this conclusion, as multiple people on this thread seem to agree that this decision is paving the way to overturn those other precedents, but I don't see that in the text. Now, there's the narrow reading of the text on pg 62, which explicitly states "to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion." (Though that's not the only place where they make this distinction.)
Since they lay out the groundwork for how and when stare decisis should apply, they're saying you have to meet that groundwork separately for other controversial precedents/decisions.
Looking a little less narrowly, some people are claiming this undermines the 'penumbra' argument that privacy-related rights are protected by due process and other amendment provisions. And yes, the decision grapples with these issues, but they still explicitly affirm prior privacy rights cases given that framework. Instead, they go out of their way to state that while those other rights are on firm footing, abortion doesn't work in this framework because both Roe and Casey decided that the state still has an interest in the unborn - an interest which under certain circumstances abrogates the abortion right. It takes issue with this, because how do you define that interest without explicitly legislating from the bench? It looks at both Roe and Casey and says there's no way to get there from here following principles of judicial review, so it tosses that rationale out.
Now, it seems to me that you could write this exact SAME opinion but reject the current opinion's agreement with Roe/Casey that the state does have an interest in the unborn. The decision tree at that point would go from this:
1. Stare decisis doesn't hold because of the 5-point system established in the decision, therefore the court can rule on this,
2. The current decision is unworkable, poorly decided, etc. So we need a new decision,
3. Private decisions like abortion would be protected by privacy,
4. Except that the court agrees with Roe/Casey that the state has an interest in protecting the unborn,
*Therefore the abortion right is universally abrogated and should be the purview of the legislatures.*
Keeping everything else the same, but changing the last point to this:
4. The court disagrees with Roe/Casey that the state's interest in protecting the unborn Constitutionally supersedes the privacy right,
*Therefore all viability restrictions on the abortion right are reversed.*
Well thank God. Personally I'm fed up entirely with "rights" that are discovered according to the current shibboleths, so they can just be shoehorned into the commonweal without anything so messy as having a big ol' debate and taking a freaking vote. A pox on this.
The original list of very basic rights Madison wrote down -- which stretch back centuries in common law tradition, so nothing he and John Jay invented over a few beers one day in 1770 -- is plenty for me. Anything else anyone wants enshrined as the law o' the land, well, let them do the tough spadework of building a majority coalition to vote legislators into office who will draft laws to that effect, so we are 100% sure we're talking about stuff we *all* (or at least most of us) agree on. This business of whoever controls the Presidency and Senate for a fleeting moment being able to bind the next 6 generations with whatever passes through their handful of heads as good and proper is a terrible way to run a republic.
So you'd prefer a theocracy in which women are enslaved to bear a child a year for their entire youth, and then executed and turned into dog food at menopause?
OK...now that we've got the extremely silly extreme cases out of our system, let's consider the reality not more than half a dozen dimensional planes from *this* Universe.
I am talking about *how* decisions are made, and I'm saying if anyone wants to establish some very broad general social standard that touches everyone's life, then the only way to preserve the social contract in a republic is for that to happen the hard way -- by politicking, deal-making, consensus-building, persuasion, and eventually an enduring ratification by the majority.
...and it is interesting that you assume that majority would do a whole bunch of things that you find horrifying, if allowed to freely exercise its sovereignty. Perhaps you don't really believe in a republic? You'd rather live under the enlightened despotism of a philosopher king?
I mean, personally I would, too, except for the tricky business of finding that godlike being. All too often, it seems, you start with a guy who promises to just make the trains run on time, and by gum he does it, and then you snap awake from your pleasant nap away from the toils of participatory democracy to find yikes all of a sudden you're raping and pillaging Ukraine or rounding the Jews up in camps, and the whole damn world hates you....how'd that happen?
Or it could be that you're just taking an expedient point of view and saying that *any* system, whatever its nature, and we should not expect to dig too deep into the details, is good so long as it gets you to outcomes you like.
Setting aside the inherent cynicism and instability therein, one would like to ask you whether you've considered the possibility that if you actually trusted your fellow citizen a smidge, and committed to doing the hard work of working together with all 160 million of them to forge enduring consensus through peaceful democratic means -- why, the world might be *even better* than this "best of all worlds" that you enjoy now, but which relies on a slightly medieval patchwork of venerating aristocrats and aristocratic institutions.
Yes, it's fascinating how the left side of the commentariat have suddenly discovered the slippery slope is *not* a fallacy after all. "If this is allowed, then they'll move on to the next step which will be even worse!"
Now, let's see if I can remember how they used to lecture us social conservatives about how that would *never* happen, how could it, and we must be crazy or paranoid or deliberately misrepresenting a fine decision representing the wishes of right-thinking people to do good for society.
Live by your words; if there is no slippery slope and never can be, then there's no slippery slope here either.
"Or it could be that you're just taking an expedient point of view and saying that *any* system, whatever its nature, and we should not expect to dig too deep into the details, is good so long as it gets you to outcomes you like."
I'm not even arguing that. I'm simply arguing that it's bad to overturn Supreme Court decisions that have *already been made* and have had positive effects on people's lives. I would have greatly preferred for gay marriage to have been legalized by the country's actual Legislature, like it was in most (all?) other countries with legal gay marriage. But now that it's already been legalized, making it illegal in a quarter of the country again - which might even involve nullifying the existing marriages of gay couples in those states - would be pointless cruelty.
"OK...now that we've got the extremely silly extreme cases out of our system, let's consider the reality not more than half a dozen dimensional planes from *this* Universe."
I'm not bringing up weird edge case scenarios, I'm just talking about the exact scenario that Anon brought up, in which the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges gets overturned - at which point, gay marriage would immediately stop being legal in all of the states that hadn't already legalized it when that decision was made. It's not some outlandish hypothetical. (I'll admit I was wrong about the "half the country" part - I just checked and it was only 13 states that hadn't already legalized it, so more like a fourth of the country. But beyond the exact number, nothing about what I said was outside the realm of likely possibility.)
Brown is firmly rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed fair and square by ratification of the states. That makes it co-equal to the Bill of Rights.
Also firmly rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment. You need to find a case that bizarrely departs from the plain text as if Anthony Kennedy were on shrooms when he wrote it, like Wickard or Raich or even Obergefell.
They are under threat because there was no strong constitutional basis to those arguments to begin with. Some of them can sort-of be justified if you squint hard enough at the equal protection clause, but that doesn’t really work with contraception or abortion.
"Holy crap" is my initial reaction, because if it's any way accurate, I never expected such a thing. Everyone is familiar with the criticism of the basis for Roe v Wade being bad law, but I don't think anybody expected any Supreme Court to actually do anything about it.
I'm now expecting screeching levels of anti-Catholicism unheard of since the height of the Wars of Religion.
I'm not *that* surprised that the court would come up with five judges willing to strike down the legal silliness of Roe V Wade and replace it with something different, or that the different thing would end up requiring the unfortunate pregnant girl in Mississippi to take a longer bus ride to get an abortion. This has been a possibility almost since Blackmun pulled that ruling out of his nether regions, and it wasn't going to go away.
I am surprised that they'd assign Alito to write the opinion, and apparently with a very broad mandate to slash and burn precedent. But this is a first draft, so it may not reflect their true thinking even if it does grossly indicate their final ruling.
Now now, I remember having this argument with you, either on DSL or SSC. I was insisting it would happen, and you were saying that that is what leftists always say, and that we're always wrong.
Good opportunity for someone to start a “P-Anon” conspiracy theory involving a Catholic plot to ban abortion because the more unwanted children there are running around unattended, the easier it will be for for their priests to…well, I wouldn’t want to put bad ideas in anyone’s head. Never mind!
You jest, but I've read exactly that line used on social media by the more extreme fruitcake types. Never underestimate the spitefulness of the "open-minded", "compassionate", "accepting and welcoming" types.
I'm pretty surprised that anywhere like five justices seem to be signed up for a broad opinion fully overturning Roe. I've long expected there to be only 1-2 votes on SCOTUS for overturning Roe (Thomas and maybe Barrett), based on Thomas writing dissents or partial concurrences in other recent abortion cases calling for overturning Roe and Casey but other justices declining to join his opinions. Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch have all opted out of joining Thomas's opinions on the matter. I don't remember if Kavanaugh has or not, but even if he hasn't had a chance yet, he doesn't seem likely to be to the right of Alito and Gorsuch on the relevant issues (substantive due process, stare decisis, etc).
In hindsight, I guess Alito and Gorsuch must have been keeping their powder dry for one or both of a case that needed to reach the heart of Roe and Casey as opposed to turning on a peripheral issue, and a time when there were five potential votes to overturn. Roberts seems to push for very narrow rulings in general and on politically sensitive issues in particular, so I could see him persuading some of the other justices to keep silent on the question of Roe and Casey when it wasn't necessary to decide the case and when it would have had little more.than expressive effect anyway.
You may be right about that. A lot of this decision feels like it was pre-written expressly to have an up-or-down ruling on Roe and Casey. At multiple points, it's careful to state that this was exactly that kind of ruling. It says that opponents of the Mississippi law asked the court to affirm Roe/Casey and that a failure to rule against the law would be tantamount to overturning those precedents. In other words, the Court was happy to oblige this clear-cut opportunity to revisit Casey.
To me, this looks like finally getting to create a strong rule around stare decisis. The opinion creates a firm, multi-point groundwork for deciding whether stare decisis should apply, instead of the often-vague rationale applied in this type of case - and in particular what was applied in Casey.
I'm not a lawyer, but are there any lawyers in the room who can comment on this? What's the likelihood of this part of the opinion becoming a standard test for stare decisis cases? It would provide a lot more clarity in determining when to take something to a lower court where there is precedent.
I see the Federalist Society, like a great many things in government and politics, as something of a "baptists and bootleggers" coalition. There are people who join and support it as a cynical means to a policy end, but there are also people who are there out of idealistic beliefs about the role of the judiciary and the proper interpretation of the Constitution. And there's a spectrum of people who have mixed motivations, as well as people who are there in varying degrees as a means of advancing personal ambition.
Overturning Roe and Casey is certainly very high among the policy ends desired by a great many of the "bootleggers", but far from the only one.
Catholicism was a -small - issue when Kennedy was elected. It never really registered when Joe Biden ran. Never had anything approaching Belfast in 1969.
Oh, I've seen a few online comments here and there about the majority of Catholics on the Supreme Court in other contexts, generally unfavourable.
Here's a few tidbits from Twitter. This is someone I follow for fandom discourse and she's generally level-headed, but this is in no way unreasonable reaction, right?
"look, the met gala going on the same night as scotus fucking gives word that forced birth will be the law of the land? that’s some real fucking dystopian shit"
Ah, yes, forced birth. Every woman in America wil be forced and compelled by law to get pregnant and deliver a baby annually. It's not like birth control is available and works, or that states that want abortion can legalise it by this draft decision? I mean, that was the big rejoinder to pro-life types: "if you don't want abortion, then encourage sex ed and contraception". What, now contraception magically will no longer work?
Here's one from someone from "Lawyers for Good Government":
"Republicans stole the Supreme Court
Putting Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh on the bench-specifically to overturn Roe and Casey
Plus-with Manchin and Sinema in the Senate
Don’t count on Congress to save the right to choose
There’s only one thing left
Rise up
VOTE"
I have to laugh about Gorsuch; he's Episcopalian, or as good as, and the only churches more liberal than TEC are the UUs and a few fringes. Granted, he was raised Catholic, so maybe stealth Papistry at work!
Keeping Colorado Blue:
"Abortion is basic healthcare. And the argument over when life begins is a red herring that has no place in this debate.
Without Roe, women have fewer rights than a corpse."
Right, right: all the years before abortion was legal, women had absolutely no rights at all. None. Kept chained up in dog kennels out in the back yard. Not even allowed vote, unlike the dead in Chicago.
Arctic Friend:
"Supreme Court justices can be impeached. But we would need control of the Senate. I also believe he should be removed. He’s a misogynistic 'race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.' The Supreme Court can never be impartial with him on the bench.
#ImpeachJusticeAlito
#AbortAlito"
And our first "hmm all them Catholics, just sayin', you know?" tweets!
Metta Force:
"The SCOTUS is 67% Catholic. Only 22% of US is Catholic."
Somebody with letters after her name that I have no idea what they mean:
"Is the “Catholic” Supreme Court going to support laws that give all babies free health care, free housing, free day care for parents, free food, free higher education, etc ?"
One sniping at Amy Coney Barrett (can't include the meme photo):
"Remember they were given to Trump in a list complied by the Federalist Society, confirmed on the qualification that they would overturn Roe v Wade"
And of course many, many iterations of The Handmaid's Tale.
Something that has to be fake, I refuse to believe any actual 10 year old ever did this:
I’m still steadfastly refusing to join Twitter but my second hand impression is that with a few exceptions one can find pretty much find any kind of crazy one desires there.
I'm not mad, rather the opposite. I'm sorry to say I'm leaning in the direction of "gloating". (Please excuse me, I'm a bit woozy after two nights straight without sleep and a lovely time sitting in the Emergency Department waiting room for eight hours before being seen and two and a half hours after that before I could go home, all that on top of having to wait in my doctor's office for three hours because she was insistent I travel by ambulance instead of being driven by a family member to hospital).
I don't think killing your offspring is a right, whether it be fifty years or five thousand. A black man enslaved and free for ten seconds after thirty years of slavery was always in possession of the right to liberty. No law can take that away from him. And no law can confer the right to kill your child.
Ooh those rascally Republicans! They will make it so mom and dad can't take Junior aside, when he hits That Special Age, and whisper to him under cover of darkness while they gaze fearfully around in case they are overheard, that "when a man and a woman love each other very much, this is how babies are made".
Oh no, wait; by "sex education" you mean "how to have sex and avoid disease and even worse, babies which happen if you don't make sure to prevent that, sex is all about pleasure and fun and nothing more, and there are many ways of having that fun which include kink which is just great and also now we want to tell you that there are an indefinite number of genders and new orientations every six months, here pick a flag".
A hypothetical scenario for you: Scientists invent a new form of contraception that's 100% effective, has no side effects, doesn't interfere with the feeling of sex at all, is trivially easy to use, and requires minimal effort. It's cheap enough and widespread enough that everyone has access to it, and it's completely reversible for anyone who does want children later on. (I know this isn't especially realistic, but bear with me.)
As a result of this new invention, the number of unwanted pregnancies drops to literally zero, except in a few ultra-conservative religious enclaves that refuse to use it. The number of abortions also drops to literally zero, except for the rare cases where a planned pregnancy goes wrong and puts the mother's physical health at risk. On-demand abortion clinics simply close down for lack of business; abortions undertaken for any reason other than "continuing the pregnancy could kill or grievously harm the mother" completely and totally stop happening.
However, the other effect of this invention is that people start having casual recreational sex at a higher rate than ever before in recorded human history. Furthermore, outside of those small religious enclaves, casual sex and recreational sex become more socially acceptable than ever before, with even the mildest stigmas against them dissolving. Finally, birth rates drop to an even greater degree than we've already seen, though not to the point where people stop having kids altogether.
Would you consider this to be a mostly positive state of affairs, a mostly negative one, or somewhere in between?
Gravity of this decision aside, I want to know what activities the leaker expects their action to enable. For (possibly? no. I was very wrong) the first time in history, the public has the opportunity to act on knowledge of a draft decision before it is actually made. What might happen now?
I personally would give 50-50 odds on an attempt on the life of a Republican supreme court justice within a year, and 90-10 odds on riots. More optimistically, this may merely galvanize the Democratic voter base to turn out in November.
Four years of Trump (and eight of Obama) with no serious assassination attempts, makes me think you are overestimating the propensity of perpetually-aggrieved Americans to actually do anything as difficult and dangerous as assassinating a high-profile political target. Unless by "attempt on the life" you mean basically "tweet about it and buy a gun".
For lower-ranking politicians, who don't have an impenetrable security bubble, there have been recent assassination attempts on Gabrielle Giffords (2011) and Steve Scalise (2017) who were both lucky enough to survive their wounds. There are probably others, less successful, that I'm forgetting too.
> envelope laced with ricin was sent to Trump before being discovered by mailing facilities, several other letters were sent to the Pentagon, all of them labeled on the front with "Jack and the Missile Bean Stock Powder"
People are trying really hard to build online pressure cookers to create crazies, and that's bad, but they've been unsuccessful[1] at recruiting anyone competent enough to accomplish anything against people on the level of SCOTUS justices.
[1] We've yet to see what's behind David Chapelle's attacker but I'm betting you'll find someone radicalized this way.
And I think you are overestimating the ability of people to continue to function as rational actors in an environment that increasingly selects against rational action.
Protests in Texas just became more important. Tech companies in Austin just got roped into Texas liberal politics real fast, if they want to stay viable in Austin.
I happen to be in Austin right now and will be for a bit. I'll report back if anyone burns me down but there's already been sporadic protests. (Nothing more than a few dozen people and hand drawn signs.)
I was the first person in my social circle to receive this news and I can report that the mood is that this might affect Austin's ability to kind of be a little blue enclave with abortion and effectively legal weed and all that. Basically that they're about to get culture war'd.
But it's a Supreme Court decision! You have to agree, you have no choice! It's the settled law of the land!
*sarcasm off*
Seriously though, wasn't that the rationale touted after Obergefell v Hodges? Tough luck states making your own decisions about passing (bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, anti-gay) laws, the Court has now decided that gay marriage is indeed a thing and you can suck it if you don't like it.
This is precisely the kind of "for the love of God, don't you see what precedent you are setting? don't you realise that if those with different views get into power, they can use these implements to make laws *you* don't like? and it was you who cut the rod to beat your own backs" consequences that I was surprised the liberal side could not see when they were riding high. Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
This ruling exists to create the framework to undercut those other rulings. That is its long-term function based on the first draft. This isn't a narrow ruling, it's a broad ruling meant to overturn as many SC rulings as possible under the banner of "state's rights". Obergefell v Hodges can easily be overturned by the same logic, as can other pieces of jurisprudence up to and including Brown v Board, and I fully expect challenges to all of these to rapidly work their way up to the SC by a number of very passionate "states rights" advocates (who will, by pure coincidence, also be pushing legislation that will attempt to outlaw abortion, gay marriage, and miscegenation on a federal level).
I predict software companies in Austin will become politically active on the side of pro-choice politics in the state of Texas for the sake of recruitment and retention. As a Texan I'm aware that Texas has a problem: liberals don't want to move here because of the conservative politics. If you are a company that wants to hire the best and brightest, that can be a handicap.
Until now, Austin has been the one exception to the image of Texas as a conservative place. But if the current abortion law stands in Texas, Austin isn't immune from conservative politics. Tech industry liberals will not want to move to Austin, where abortion is illegal.
So I suspect Austin tech companies, and Texas billionaires like Elon Musk, will get behind the pro-choice movement in Texas to overturn the current abortion law. Either that or they will flee the state. But I suspect they will stay and choose and win the political battles here that are in their interests.
I'm not so sure about Musk. This is a man who had 8 kids, 7 surviving. I have no idea of his personal views, but he might just decide to stay out of this one and let the lawyers fight it out.
It's more about "I would never live in Texas because gross. Backwards rednecks." But many such people would make an exception for The People's Republic of Austin because what the backwards rednecks did in the State House didn't much affect anyone else living in Austin. Now Austinites have the humiliation of having to follow the rules their conservative Christian overlords have set.
The leaked opinion is apparently a several-months-old first draft, which suggests against a deliberate leak by a justice or clerk.
I can see a few possibilities. As you say, a clerk might have left it on the table at Starbucks or something. Or someone could have snuck into an office left unsecured and snatched it off someone's desk. Or a justice or clerk might have shared it privately with someone outside the court, either as a heads-up or a request for under-the-table feedback, and someone in the recipient's office passed it on to reporters.
Your last suggestion is what makes the most sense to me. Someone's clerk sent a draft out to a law professor or someone, probably to solicit feedback or suggestions of some kind, and the professor's research assistant sent it to Politico. Clerks and even some justices have been known to leak small bits of information occasionally, but never something so brazen as leaking an entire draft opinion for publication. That's the sort of career-destroying action I have a hard time believing a SCOTUS clerk would be willing to risk. People can get disbarred and criminally prosecuted for this sort of thing, and even if the clerk avoided those outcomes, no firm would ever hire someone with a known history of leaking their boss's confidential legal documents to the press; they're a walking ethics violation.
I would guess contempt of court[1]. Most courts have standing orders[2] concerning private and confidential court records, and someone *working* for the court, or what they call an "officer of the court" (a lawyer admitted to practice before the court) would be expected to be fully versed in them, such that disobeying one would lay you open to a criminal contempt charge. IANAL but that's my guess.
That Politico reporter has previously used Amit Jain as a source. Jain clerks for Sotomayor and has made... intemperate statements about Kavanaugh in the past.
Hi, on a previous thread (or maybe on the subreddit) someone had mentioned an app for setting goals and reflecting on them. It had a paid version where you could talk to a human and a name that dropped the first letter of a common word (think "concile" from "reconcile" but clever). Can anyone remember what it was?
Why does Twitter have such high operating expenses? What do they need all those programmers for? They've made only a couple of changes to the site (all for the worse) in 15 years.
What are the programmers spending all their time doing?
If you have engineers, they will always find work for themselves. Even if you're not shipping any new products, they can set themselves the never-ending task of taking your current janky codebase and rewriting it from the ground up to be slightly less janky. (By the time the job is done it will be janky again.)
As for why they hired them all in the first place... organisations grow because they can, not because they need to. Every manager wants to have more headcount.
I'd be surprised if the software itself was incredibly large, compared to their user base. The feature set is pretty small.
But they need to maintain a big infrastructure. At their scale, they need to be running their own iron for most of their operations, not just clicking "give me another server" from AWS.
*EDIT* thinking more, if I were asked the minimum dev team I'd want, it would be about 50 for handling all the user-level features, and maybe another 20-50 for the ones for advertisers and selling the data. Those don't scale very much with the size of the user base, but the amount of iron needed generally scales linearly.
There are a lot of dumb parts, but here's a sensible part that's easy to understand:
There are 500 million tweets a day right now. A lot of software which worked at 100,000 tweets a day doesn't work at 500 million tweets a day, because it wasn't designed to do that. Think of Microsoft Word handling a 50 page document with ease, then struggling on a 200 page document, then choking on a 5000 page document.
When pieces of software don't work at a certain scale, Twitter needs to rewrite them. Early on, they could just use other people's tools and libraries without understanding them. Now, they need to hire the people who built those old things, and pay them to build new things that work at massive scales. Think what an undertaking it would be if you needed to hire ex-Word-programmers to write a clone of Word that could handle 5000 page documents.
From ~ 200,000 tweets a year (year 1) to 500,000,000 tweets a day (year 17) there have probably been one or two such jumps *for every component of their software stack*. That's a lot of work.
One important piece of context is that contemporary software projects are staggeringly high towers of code that builds code that builds code that serves code that transforms code that compiles code, et cetera et cetera, layer upon layer, abstraction on abstraction, tool upon tool. Because why build some functionality when you can import it? And most of those tools weren't built by the team that's in charge of the project. Most of them were built for free by random strangers.
One thing that happens, that's pretty easy to explain, is that sometimes security vulnerabilities are discovered in widely-used code. Look up "heartbleed" for a dramatic example of this. But all code is constantly being updated, all the time, for security but also for lots of other reasons. All code runs in an execution context -- it's interpreted by some operating system or browser. Eventually, OSs and browsers stop supporting certain bad old features; and if you stopped maintaining your code five years ago, chances are good it won't run (or it won't run very well) on people's computers anymore.
And if you want Google to love you and show you near the top of the search results? Hoo boy, your code has to be very up to date and modern, and use all the latest awesome, efficient techniques that hadn't been invented last year. Twitter absolutely has to do this. Or else you'll be searching for something you saw in a Twitter thread somewhere, and instead of Twitter, Google will show you some highly-efficient spam page that copied that content from Twitter and wants to convince Google that it (and its ads) are what you really want to see.
To segue into another popular subject on this site... It sounds like a huge value of AI would be if it could maintain all that code on its own. Then we end up with companies like Twitter, Uber and Spotify operating in the black. Before that happens, I'm not going to worry too much about superintelligent AI. I don't see GPT-3 learning to maintain Twitter's software anytime soon.
Or am I wrong about thinking about the progression of AI in that way?
Yes, that would be hugely valuable, but no, we're not anywhere close to that. There are myriad different TOOLS that scan your code and the libraries used etc for vulnerabilities, knowing how to fix it is a whole different thing and often a matter of opinion and research.
We're like... barely in the baby steps stage of AI helping you code one method at a time, and that's a cutesy "aw look at what it can do" sort of thing.
Well, to give an easy example of how it got that way, you could consider https://date-fns.org/ This is a JavaScript library that helps you deal with dates and times. Time is a huge problem for a web site, since the Internet is global. Your programmers are in one time zone, your servers are in another, and your user's browser is in a third. We have a pretty good, universal way to talk about time (milliseconds since "unix epoch", ie January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC), but converting that into something user-readable is a pain.
"Pain", if you try and manage displaying dates and times yourself, means hours of research, hours of writing code, debugging that code, incorporating it into your existing code, and then (because, if you're doing it for the first time, you're going to overlook stuff) it still won't work. As unexpected cases crop up, you're going to have to come back and fix things, over and over again. And then, when some government changes whether or not they do daylight savings time, you have to rewrite your code!
It's actually far, far more efficient for one team in the world to do that work, and everybody else in the industry just type "import { format } from 'date-fns'" and "`It happened on a ${format(new Date(myNumberOfSecondsSinceEpoch), "eeee")}.`"
This is so much quicker than the alternative, and the demands of running a website are so complex and numerous, that if you insisted on writing it all yourself "from scratch", you would never finish. Which means that everybody uses date-fns (or something like it) and everybody has to employ a bunch of engineers just to maintain all that stuff; because it's far, far better than paying them to do it themselves.
"It's actually far, far more efficient for one team in the world to do that work, and everybody else in the industry just type "import { format } from 'date-fns'" and "`It happened on a ${format(new Date(myNumberOfSecondsSinceEpoch), "eeee")}.`""
...and then your UX team decides it'd be better if, instead of dates, you put relative time on each item - "2 days ago", "3 months ago", "just now" - and all that date representation is now useless (unless you added a feature to let users just see that), and there are no third party libraries for it, because the display is idiosyncratic to your app ("2 days ago" for Reddit desktop, "2d" for Twitter mobile).
Oh, and probably a useful rule of thumb: if it looks like simple code anyway, ask yourself whether it's internationalized, and if it's not, then knowing nothing else, multiply complexity by roughly 18.
What do people's office climates look like with the lifting pandemic restrictions?
My office used to encourage remote work (both explicitly, as in "if you can work from home, please work from home," and also implicitly through mask requirements and closing the dining room). It recently switched to encouraging a return to the office (in particular, masks are optional, dining room is open again) -- though many people have concluded that actually working from home is great, and are still doing a lot of it (there's no strong pressure to show up at the office unless you need to work with a physical object there).
One development I was expecting to see was "if you're feeling under the weather, please wear a mask," but the official policy is instead "if you're feeling under the weather, please stay home". This isn't terrible as policies go, but it means that "masks optional" actually means "masks off" -- there's just no room for "I'm feeling sick enough to wear a mask, but not sick enough to stay home." I'm not yet decided how I feel about this, does anyone have a coherent opinion?
Before the pandemic, most people in my office worked from home part of the week and went to the office part of the week. We weren't allowed to work from home the whole week.
In 2020, I think early summer, we suddenly got a new policy: work from home all the time unless there was a pressing need to come to the office.
A month or two ago, we got the option to either go back to how it was or work from home all the time. I'm staying home because everyone else is staying home.
Out here in Trump country we haven't been masked since last summer. (Well some businesses, medical places wanted you to mask, and I did.) Where I work people stayed home if they had covid (or were feeling sick). I know omicron was just last winter, but I feel so over being afraid of covid. (I realize there are some people who still do need to be afraid of it.) I have this theory that the media likes to scare us, 'cause that causes us to tune into more media.
I don't think it follows that masks optional now means masks off. You might still wear a mask to protect yourself or others from asymptomatic transmission, or protect yourself from people who come in despite having symptoms. People might
Also, covid symptoms vary a lot and most masks are way below 100% effective, so the idea of sick enough to wear a mask but not sick enough to stay home doesn't make too much sense.
It certainly used to make sense in practice, in that people would not have been staying home for 1-2 weeks with a cold; they would at most take 1-2 days for the worst of it. (I'm not totally sure that this is true of my current office -- I started working here during the pandemic -- but it was true of every other place I worked.) Are you saying that adding Covid into the mix actually changes the calculation, such that it now doesn't? Or that it shouldn't have made sense in the first place?
That it doesn't now given covid and in the context of a work place where people can work from home.
Absent covid, I think masks when you're a bit ill's quite a good idea, but I suppose just wasn't considered as an option outside of some asian countries. But even then, better to work from home if you can.
Also, pre-covid norms of coming to work once over the worst of it were maybe not, on balance, a good thing. Certainly some work places tried to encourage people to stay home.
Sure it makes sense. Many people can't just simply isolate any time they have any symptoms at all e.g. sniffles or minor cough but masking might be an extra pro-social precaution you can take in that circumstance.
Many people can't. But in the work place described they were previously 100% working from home, and they now have a policy of not coming in with symptoms, so presumably they can there.
I had to work in the office the entire time. Masks were mandatory until August 2021, were off for a month, then required again until February 2022. Some people who can work from home still work from home, this isn't necessarily possible for everybody. Maybe 1 in 5 people still wear masks in the office. Sick policy is nuts, but it was always nuts: you have to use PTO for it (though we get a lot of PTO). So if you can't WFH then you either use vacation days or come in sick anyways. There is no requirement for isolation period. So people come in when they're probably still covid-positive, and hopefully wear masks. The general opinion many of us have is "fuck it, nothing matters anymore, if we have to be here anyways it's better to have no rules than to screw people twice over."
Do masks work any better against the regular cold-and-flu vs. COVID? (In your computation, regular cold-and-flu should be what mildly symptomatic people are having most of the time.)
Last I heard, the general sense was that masks work better for influenza than for COVID, and better for COVID than for most common cold varieties.
Although I suspect the large majority of people with mild resperatory symptoms (particularly runny or stuffy noses) have allergies, not anything infectious.
Seems like quality of mask and goodness of fit are more important than whether person removes mask briefly to drink water. Bad fit or droopy mask means half your exhales are going straight out into the room. Mask removal for 1 minute in an hour increases the amount of unfiltered exhales you're inflicting on the room by less than 2%.
I switched jobs during the pandemic, so it's possible that this office used to be different. At my previous one, the cultural norm was that you stayed home for, say, the worst day or two of your cold -- certainly not for the entire 1-2 weeks that a cold actually lasts. The rest of the 1-2 weeks you'd take dayquil (so that you weren't sniffling or coughing in your neighbor's ear all the time), warn said neighbor that you were trying to not breathe on them, and that was that. (The likely response was "oh no, feel better," not "go home, you grandma-killing monster.") I would've expected that after the pandemic, you would communicate the idea that you were trying to not breathe on people by putting on a mask.
When we moved to the US, I was a teenager but my brother was a toddler, and I remember my mother being very surprised that daycares would take in kids with runny noses; she says that when I was in daycare, I would skip one week out of every four due to having a cold. (Which might be better public health policy, but is much less sustainable for working parents.) So, these mores certainly differ across space (and I'm sure across time as well). My impression for my current place and time before the pandemic was that colds were considered to mostly be ignorable, and the level of effort you were expected to put into not spreading them was "cover your nose when you sneeze" and "wash your hands," rather than "work from home."
The 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s had very distinctive styles in terms of fashion, clothing, graphic design, music, food, pretty much everything.
Then sometime around 1999, we got stuck. There was no distinctive 2000s style that looks different to a 2010s style, and the 2020s aren't looking great either unless you count pandemic-induced slobbiness as a fashion trend. Basically, 2022 looks like 2002 except with smartphones.
What gives? Possible explanations:
1. Something about the internet soaking up all the innovation leaving meatspace stuck in an eternal 1999
2. The 1950s-1990s period was a weird abberation, a manifestation of the "generation gap" between the boomers and their parents.
3. This is all an illusion and actually 2022 looks as unlike 2012 as 1992 looked unlike 1982, and I'm just not sensitive enough to notice it.
I honestly think that you don't notice change because fashion has become so kalaidoscopic that no one style can ever really register or gain dominance over the others. In a place full of fashion conscious young people I could spot someone dressed from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or not really trace-able. Every type of thing is so available that nothing really ever looks out of place.
The current style already encompasses everything, so the current style can't change.
Any thoughts about fast fashion? I'm not into it, but I keep hearing ecological complaints about it and I assume the clothes look different. Layers of flimsy garments? Years different from previous years?
Culture is immensely decentralized now as compared to past decades. In the 50s there were only a few tv channels that EVERYONE watched, now there are hundreds that some people watch. In 1955, the telecast of Peter Pan got 65 MILLION viewers, ie over 1/3 of the population of the country watched it. In 1980, 35 percent of viewers watched Dallas. The most popular non-sports show in 2019 was Big Bang Theory, with under 11 percent of the viewership.
All of this applies to music and fiction writing and theater and other forms of culture too. The internet is accelerating this, but we're living in a golden age of niche subcultures, and I think this applies to fashion too. It's not that we got stuck, it's that we got UNSTUCK, and there is no longer a consistent ticking clock of fashion that everyone pays attention to.
If you walk around a big city, particularly in areas with lots of young people, you'll see a huge variety of different "Looks" now, rather than a few looks copied over and over, although there's some of that too, eg the recent fashion for athleisure wear.
In the sense of fashion yes. Before modern media, it all had a tendency to flow from royal whims, or stay stable for decades and sometimes centuries. The expense and practical requirements of manufacturing clothing also got in the way of doing interesting innovation on a personal or a subcultural level. In many times and places there are have also been caste systems that were delineated by clothing, completely eliminating fashion as a consideration for many people.
Very tentative, but I think there's been a recent change in women's makeup as seen on youtube.
There was a style that I didn't like-- an extremely smooth look with fake shadows and highlights and shadows which didn't quite match the actual lighting. Uncanny valley territory.
I'm not seeing as much of it.
Also, there was a fad for *very* bright red lipstick and I'm not seeing it any more.
It's too soon. You don't recognise the changes until you look back. 2010 is relatively near in time so it's still forming people's tastes and clothing choices. If you've been wearing cargo pants (90s) and hoodies (popularised in 70s) for the past ten/fifteen/twenty years, then changes aren't as apparent as if you're keeping up with each new season's look.
This article talks about 2010s fashion trends and what came into vogue then:
>then changes aren't as apparent as if you're keeping up with each new season's look.
But the thing is, in the 1950s or 60s, people didn't have to actively try to keep up with the trends. It's just what was available in stores and they bought it. Now, much of what's in stores is stuff that could have been made at any point in the past 30 years.
The internet isn't a weird decentralising force; 20th century mass-media was a weird centralising force and its fall is bringing us back to the historical norm.
Early 2000s fashion had skinny low-rise jeans and grommet belts, often with an exposed “whale tail”. Haven’t seen that look for quite a while, but I have been enjoying the triumphant rise of yoga pants during the last decade or so. That said, the proliferation of different subgroups with differing retro influences has become a complicating factor.
Potential compounding/confounding factor: the first two decades of any century are harder to name. The 20s, 30s, 40s, etc can easily be called as such, but there's confusion about what to call the 00s and 10s (I don't think naughties ever worked). Not having a solid name for them makes it harder to compartmentalise like we do (somewhat inaccurately perhaps) for other decades
I disagree! While it is true that 2022 fashion includes many references to the fashion of the 90s and the 00s, there has been a lot of development. One very noticeable thing is the shift away from skinny jeans, especially in young women's fashion. Another, related trend is that today's fashion influencers get their inspiration from "Streetwear", which is an amalgam of subcultural fashion of the last 50 years (punk, metal, hip hop, fetish, raver, etc.). This is in stark contrast to the influencers of the 10s, who wore several interations of cutesy smart casual clothes.
I can recommend some videos on GenZ vs. Millenials in fashion:
Not that it hasn't changed, but that it's changed more slowly and subtly. The 1970s had flared pants, the 1980s had big hair and shoulder pads, the 90s had everyone suddenly looking like a Friends character. What do the 2000s have?
Alternatively: you're watching a movie and it wants you to know a particular flashback is set in a particular time period. There's a visual shorthand that will tell you "60s", "70s", "80s", or "90s" in a moment, but if the scene is in the early 2000s what do you show? Guys with spiky blond hair and cargo pants? Three button suits? There's no iconic 2000sness out there.
For women in casual fashion wear jeans got lower and shirts got higher leading to more exposed stomachs. It was also fashionable to show off underwear peaking out for both men and women. This led to a significant amount of accessorizing around the belly. Men's pants became loose and were supposed to hang (again exposing underwear) with shirts that were loose enough you could see underneath them. This was often layered and added in jewelry. There were also shifts in formal fashion and the rise of subcultures like the emo or nerd chic crowd. But to me the iconic look is someone like Rihanna(1) or Justin Timberlake(2). And yes, that means spiky short hair for men and long, straight hair for women. Often multicolored for both.
We've had two fashion cycles since then, perhaps most famously shown by that picture of Arianna Grande and Billie Eilish.(3)
Also, I'll second that Bojack Horseman does a good job with this. "Generic 2007 pop song. Autotuned so all the voices sound weird. *Shift to rap bridge* This is a pop song. Uh. It's 2007. Huh. This ain't 2006. It's 2007!"
There is, of course, a generic work outfit of jeans and rough shirts which is pretty unchanging. A handyman in overalls and all that doesn't look that different from his 19th century forebears and even has some similarities with 18th and 17th century work clothes. And we now get a lot more pictures of ordinary people so we see more and more of this common outfit.
Bojack Horseman always has a parodic montage of things associated with a time period when they do a flashback, and s3e2 flashbacked to 2007, so that seems like a good place to look.
I remember thinking in the 90s that there was no 90s style, but now we do have images. I think 00s is going to be associated with classic hipster aesthetic (low rise skinny jeans, etc) but we will see.
Architecture has very clear 2000s and 2010s styles - I don’t know if that means that architectural styles are easier to see faster than clothing styles, or rather than clothing styles just aren’t as distinct in these decades as architectural styles.
4. The internet has decentralized culture enough that the only "unifying aesthetic" that can exist is the generic. Different subcultures have their own fashion trends and aesthetic identities that progress and evolve, but the mainstream is now crystallized as inoffensive grey.
with a side of
5. Many of the distinctive styles we remember from those decades were themselves subcultures (with the exception of things like Yuppies, which were an attempt by mainstream culture to brand itself as counterculture) with the mainstream of the '60's and '70's looking very much like the '50's.
And a dollop of
6. The late 80's signaled the start of a systemic collapse in public interest in the arts and humanities in favor of grievance studies, STEM, and a culture of criticism, scorn, and ironic detachment, leading to artists either being reduced to safe, flavorless commodity-manufacturers or returning to their default status as a resented pariah class in popular consciousness. In an environment where the mainstream is cripplingly afraid of feeling sincere emotion, art cannot thrive, thus forcing it to retreat to subcultures.
Here is an example of ladies fashion that has noticeably changed. IIRC in 00s near all girls/ladies wore some kind of jeans or other trousers (with minority wearing skirts), until they they changed to form fitting leggings around 10s. First it was just teenagers, then young adults, and today the plain joggins have been steadily making their way to "middle aged ladies' business casual" which equals boring and polar opposite of "trendy". So if you were an aspiring time traveler without access to your multidimensional chronometer, you can identify pre-05 and post-05 from the visible presence of garment only, and extrapolate the point between 05 and 22 by looking how widely adopted it was.
If you want to get a more precise timelocation, pay attention to the colors / pattering / texture: I didn't pay much attention to how it changed, but I think first there was plain black, then jeans-like, then weird colors and flower patterns, and for a while, a sporty look of sporty synthetic textile. (Which is also getting a bit old and I am quite confident something different will come soon.)
Question about Nato expansion, "not one inch to the East" etc.
I've seen people on Russia's side of this argument (eg Jeff Sachs) state that promises were broken, and I've seen the West's response which I've tried to describe below, but I've never found someone engage with or try refute that response.
What am I getting wrong/missing?
What happened -
1. During discussions re reunification of Germany, Russia were given verbal assurances that Nato would not expand eastwards within reunified Germany. The phrase "not one inch to the east" was used.
2. But in the end the actual treaty agreed allowed for some troops in what was East Germany.
3. No assurances were ever discussed or given about other former Soviet states joining Nato.
4. Russia itself discussed joining Nato and were told they would need to apply like everyone else and so didn't (my guess is they wouldn't have been admitted if they did apply)
West's view -
A. if it's not in the treaty it doesn't count, democracies change governments all the time, new governments can't be bound by verbal assurances of their predecessors
B. This is especially so if the treaty that was signed already wasn't in line with those verbal assurances
C. No assurances re former soviet states were given.
D. The idea that the states that were actually part of the USSR and then became sovereign not being allowed to join Nato is strange - it's essentially like saying, we promise not to let you join our club even if you want to?
5. Reunification of Germany was highly contested, including worries in London and Paris. Important disputed questions between Moscow and Washington included whether reunified Germany could be in NATO at all - or not.
6. At the time of 2+4, the Soviet Union was visibly changing, but still perceived as one of the superpowers.
On the West's view:
I've often heard experts saying basically: nobody believed at the time that NATO expansion to the east was even an option. That's why western diplomats & head of states had no problem emphasising they had no intention to encourage this - and maybe why Moscow didn't insist in putting it into a form of treaty. Combined with the argument: Well, but the world has changed since then.
The West's view as described by you has a couple of weak points in my view:
a) if verbal assurances were given in an issue of key importance to the other side - and it looks like that was the case - then saying 'we don't care anymore, bad luck you didn't force us to put it down', is not very helpful. It seems obvious that this can/will/should annoy/bother the other side.
b) C. is not really true, if verbal assurances were given.
c) we know from everyday situations, that people take statements that are either important or convenient to them much more serious than those that are 'unconvient/relatively irrelevant'. While interactions among states are often more formalized, I don't think political leaders & nations are immune against this kind of thing. So, if verbal assurances were given and believed by Soviet/Russian elites, they have an importance, even if they cannot be formally claimed.
d) In 2+4 negotiations, western leaders wanted to get consent from Moscow on issues that at the time were seen as a huge step for the Soviet Union. Moscow went further than many thought possible at the time (or certainly two years earlier). During that process, the image was conveyed that - given Moscow's consent - the new situation would not be used in a way that Moscow might find 'threatening' (for it's security or also it's major interests). On NATO, it was emphased (several times verbally) that NATO expansion to the east was not an option.
So when a couple of decades later western leaders basically say 'oh, but now we don't care anymore, other things are more important', it can understandibly lead to an image in M. of 'we made concessions in good faith of not loosing out in this deal, and now the costs for us get higher and higher, and you guys suddenly 'can't remember''. This is already being very close to feeling cheated upon.
e) Also in democracies, leaders feel bound by the history of their nations and by historic relationsships / assurances. 'Oh, but anyway we have no mandate to promise anything that is not in written' is a very easy excuse.
f) The assurances you mention in D. would be strange in a perfect world. But for now, the world is not perfect. Again, we see very often - in group settings, business hierarchies and also among states - that there are spheres of influence and 'historical' interests. And that somebody encroaching on those is not well accepted. In this view, a formal promise of 'never allowed to ... ' excluding sovereign states forever would seem strange, but saying sth. like 'look, this would be really annoying to X, let's talk about this in a decade again' seems rather normal.
A lot there! And v.interesting/informative. But I think you're jumping past most of the argument right at the start with - "if verbal assurances were given in an issue of key importance to the other side - and it looks like that was the case"
My understanding is that it was the US Secretary of State in talks about German reunification in 1990. But it wasn't a promise for Nato not to expand it was in specific context, and without the backing of Nato, Germany.
The current Russian government feels existentially threatened by the expansion of the European Union, because the European Union is full of happy, prosperous people with hope for a better future and Russia isn't. If it becomes clear that this option is open even to Eastern European Slavic people who used to live in poor post-Soviet kleptocracies, and that Step 1 is to hold a "color revolution" and oust the post-Soviet kleptocrats, then the Russian people might talk to Russian-speaking Eastern European Slavs and get ideas.
The current Russian government feels existentially threatened by NATO, because NATO stops them from dealing with the existential threat posed by the EU in the obvious way - invading or threatening to invade Eastern European nations before they can join the EU. And because they fear that when Moscow has its color revolution, NATO will roll in with tanks and planes to stop the Red Army from just crushing the protesters under tank treads like they "deserve" and instead remake Russia as a nice NATO/EU protectorate.
To be fair, NATO does have a track record of trying to do that sort of thing, albeit not so far against any dictator with access to nuclear weapons and they probably would balk at intervening in a Russian Revolution.
The Russian regime's security requires that basically all the nations bordering Russia be filled with people even more miserable than the Russians, with no hope of a better future except by sucking up to Russia in exchange for being allowed to be only *slightly* less miserable than the Russians. And the Russian regime thought that, when we said NATO wouldn't expand eastwards, we were promising to let them arrange things that way.
Also, Vladimir Putin was probably happiest when he was an up-and-coming KGB officer climbing towards the highest ranks of power in the greatest empire of the age, and now that empire is basically equivalent to Nigeria with more oil, more barren wasteland, and nuclear weapons. He wants it all back the way it was. He gave Morden the same answer that Londo Mollari did, and now the Ukrainians are playing the role of the Narns.
It’s certainly not the case that every country bar FR and DE feels this way. Italy is especially bad, with 30 years of economic stagnation but that’s not the case everywhere else. Most states are not that bad but chronic low growth and unemployment are undoubtedly an issue in many countries. And a shortage of affordable housing.
Even here in Ireland, where living standards have steadily risen and there are plenty of jobs, it’s not all rosy: housing is a disaster, especially in Dublin. But there isn’t despair.
As it happens, France is one of the least satisfied countries per EU-wide option polls. Just add up the recent combined vote for LePen, Melenchon and Zammour.
Globalisation has been good for graduates but not for the working class in the West generally, not just the EU. In the US you have the rust belt and rise of Trump. France has post-industrial decline and LePen, Italy has had Berlusconi (the proto Trump), Northern League, Five Star…almost everywhere is seeing the old left-right split morphing into a losers-winners from globalisation divide.
What’s the solution? I really don’t know. The EU announces a new multi-hundred billion euro plan every years and they all fail. There just isn’t the same demand for working men especially, and migration keeps wages down for trades and semi-skilled jobs. You can’t get a mortgage because your wages are too low and property too pricy. Then nobody wants to marry you, you don’t have kids, etc. The extreme version was Russia in the 1990s, which led to an alcoholism epidemic. The West is just doing it more slowly. US opioid epidemic for example: but does anyone in power care?
As discussed in TM's subthread above, we did give them promises less explicit and less binding than a ratified treaty but substantial enough that it's understandable they feel miffed when we do the thing they thought we had promised not to do.
More generally, "I didn't *really* make that promise; I cleverly got him to do what I want by letting him *think* I made the promise" is penny wise and pound foolish in politics. There's no God above who smites with lightning people who break their promises, there's just the predictable consequences of pissing people off by putting them in a position where they think - correctly or otherwise - that you've broken a promise.
This seems to just assume the Russian side of things is basically correct. It may well be btw, but I'm trying to get at why.
Let's say a Russian characterises the West's thought process as per your second para, "we [the West] didn't *really* make that promise; but we cleverly got them to do what we want by letting them *think* we made that promise" (I've changed I and him to we and them)
I think you could sum up the West's response as - "we genuinely didn't make that promise, they are taking something said out of the narrow context in which it was said and ignoring lots of other stuff."
Then the West's side gives various reasons for this, as per OP plus on further research some others*, which never seems to be replied to by people taking or even just explaining the Russia's side of things.
*including that, in the West's view, domestic pressure lead to Russian politicians knowingly misrepresenting later discussions/agreements as including assurances they didn't
NATO isn't going to invade Russia. Nobody's going to invade Russia, because they've got nukes. If Putin claims otherwise, he's lying. NATO is a defensive alliance, not because their charter says so, but because Russia has nukes.
Putin hates NATO, not because they threaten him (they don't!), but because they stand in the way of him fulfilling his ambition to conquer his neighbors. He's not invading Ukraine because they joined NATO; he's only able to invade Ukraine because they didn't join NATO.
So why did he invade Ukraine? I don't know. I don't particularly trust any of the various reasons he and his supporters have given. Maybe he wants Ukraine's farmland, or some other resource, or maybe he just wants to rule over as many people as he can.
>I don't particularly trust any of the various reasons he and his supporters have given.
What about the one where he sees Ukraine's sovereignty as historical aberration, which he wants rectified? Both his rhetoric and actions seem consistent with treating it as a rebel province, including the part where the "special operation" wouldn't pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis, even if Ukraine had been easily captured in its entirety.
That one might well be true. Or it might be a cover for a more cynical motive.
If Ukraine had been captured as quickly and easily as expected, why would that not pass cost-benefit analysis? A week or two of other people's sons fighting, and then Putin has a lot more subjects, and the enhanced prestige of having won a war.
I meant for Russia in the long term, not for the tsar himself in the short-medium. Of course, he is old now and doesn't appear to give a shit for anybody except himself, even for his kleptocratic cronies, so whatever amuses him is good enough.
My bafflement about the whole NATO Expansion complaint is that NATO is fundamentally a defensive alliance and so its expansion doesn't actually represent a threat. Russia is a nuclear power with a strategic second strike capability. A thousand Abrams sat at idle in Red Square would no more threatening to the continuation of their state than NATO at its 1990 boarders.
The only thing the expansion of NATO does is prevent former soviet block countries being invaded and having their regimes forcibly changed by a resurgent Russia. And if Russia wants to whine that they can't invade and oppress their neighbours any more because those joined a defensive alliance specifically formed to curtail Russian imperialism, well they should just say that out loud and see what kind of sympathy they get. The idea of a broken promise or threatening expansion is nonsense.
> The only thing the expansion of NATO does is prevent former soviet block countries being invaded and having their regimes forcibly changed by a resurgent Russia.
But nobody ever should prevent forced regime changes by USA, god forbid. USA bombs Middle East countries "for freedom". Russia opposes NATO expansion "to prevent threat". Lies in politics are the norm, and there is no rational reasons for Russia to stop lying first.
Also, military invasion is not the only way NATO can threaten Russia. Any major country seeks to control its weaker neighbors, through economy, culture or force. Russia's economy is not going to outpace Europe, USA or China's any time soon. Culture plays a big part, but many ex-USSR countries take steps to break that bond, too - none going as far as Ukraine with its campaign against Russian language (which began way before 2014). Force is the only remaining recourse, and therefore NATO is a threat. Also, with NATO membership, countries would find it easier to (and maybe would be pressured to) break both cultural and economic bonds with Russia faster.
Now, why would USA want to threaten Russia (with non-military means, but using its presence in ex-USSR countries) if it did nothing wrong, e.g. did not invade any of its neighbors, you may ask. Well, for any reason, really. Imagine all countries around Russia closing their borders to all trade whenever USA doesn't like something Russia did, like maybe not allowing US companies to capture a part of market, or acting against US interests in some other part of the world, say, named Syria. Hell, with some of the possible US presidential candidates voting for a wrong country in Eurovision could start an economic blockade.
I mean, it's pretty much what's happening right now with sanctions, but Russia can use it neighbors to evade some sanctions right now. If all of those neighbors are controlled by USA, there would be no such possibilities.
So, yes, NATO expansion is a threat, even if we don't take the possibility of a military invasion seriously (which is not ENTIRELY true - a civil war in Russia, for example, might invite a NATO invasion, if nukes are either divided between warring sides or disabled somehow).
It seems like you define "threat" as "anything which reduces Russia's cultural/economic/military control over its weaker neighbors (which is something 'any major country' wants)" which, if true, is revealing.
Revealing of what? That Russia is a country just like any other country? USA gets to define pretty much anything anywhere in the world as a threat to its interests. Hell, USA literally threatened China with war if China built a naval base on Solomon islands recently. I mean, China is not going to attack USA, because USA has nuclear weapons, so what threat could a naval base possess? Maybe Chinese sailors just reeeeealy like the local cuisine.
Or as a thought exercise, imagine a democratically-elected Mexican government deciding suddenly to join a China-led "defensive alliance" for whatever reasons. How fast would you think American tanks would be in Mexico City, even though this alliance clearly poses no threat to USA? (Actually, tanks might not be needed, as America is far more skilful than Russia in replacing unwanted governments, but if Plan A failed, Plan B or Plan C would certainly involve tanks; there would be no Plan S, which is "do nothing and allow it").
>Hell, USA literally threatened China with war if China built a naval base on Solomon islands recently. I mean, China is not going to attack USA, because USA has nuclear weapons, so what threat could a naval base possess?
The threat is to Australia, not the US.
>Even though this alliance clearly poses no threat to USA?
There's no conceivable reason Mexico would do this except to give China the ability to have military forces close to the US.
Ukraine has literally been invaded by Russia 8 years ago and had territory annexed. Russia also invaded several of its other neighbors in the past few decades. That Ukraine wants NATO membership for strictly defensive purposes is trivially true and justifiable.
When has the US done anything remotely comparable to how Russia has treated Ukraine? Over a century ago?
There is no analogy here. That the US wouldn't be okay with the Chinese military on its doorstep does not mean Russia are justified in violently opposing the mere SUGGESTION of NATO membership for Ukraine.
2003. In 2003 we invaded Iraq and replaced its government with a government more to our liking. We did it for trumped up bullshit reasons that most people saw through at the time (WMDs), when the real reason was to transform the country and region in a way we preferred (beacon of democracy in the heart of the Arab world).
Cuba was allied with the USSR for decades, and is very close to the U.S. After the failure of our assassination attempts and the Bay of Pigs, did we launch a full invasion with tanks in Havana? No. We decided it wasn't worth it. Do you think we would treat an alliance between China and Mexico differently?
I think USA would treat it differently, yes. It's the difference between Finland joining NATO and Ukraine joining NATO: both are undesirable to Russia, but one have to be tolerated (if protested), and the other can be dealt with.
The reason is, Finland is basically already protected by NATO - like Cuba was protected by USSR. A full invasion of Cuba might have led to a very hot, possibly nuclear war (USSR probably could not protect Cuba directly due to its remoteness, but could instead attack American troops in Europe, maybe; Cuban Missile Crisis was partially a result of Castro's fear that USA would indeed continue attempts to remove him from power, and USA only really stopped because USSR proved to treat Cuba as a serious issue).
If Ukraine already had American troops stationed on its soil, Russia would dare not attack. The same goes for our hypothetical Mexico situation - if Chinese army was already quartering south of Texas, USA probably would have to resort to economic means and covert operations. But if it was only a statement of policy (written into Constitution, as it was in Ukraine - yes, they literally changed their Main Law to say "we gonna be in NATO"), to be acted on in some (possibly near) future? Regime change time.
So there’s a gap we’ll have to iron out if you want to have a sincere talk about Russia/Ukraine. When you talk about the USA, you seem to define “threat” narrowly (i.e. a defensive alliance between China and Mexico “poses no threat to USA”).
But when you talk about Russia, you seem to use a much broader definition for “threat” that seems to include anything which would make a weaker neighbor “find it easier to (and maybe would be pressured to) break both cultural and economic bonds with Russia.”
I’m happy to have a conversation under either framework. Under the first, I don’t think you can qualify Ukraine or NATO expansion as a “threat” to Russia. Under the second I think if you certainly can call it a “threat” since the definition of “threat” is so broad, but now you have to have a conversation about how great a “threat” has to be to justify a military response, and I think Russia loses out at that stage of the argument. But for either conversation “threat” needs a consistent definition – we can’t just keep switching shoes based on our actors.
I did not try to define "threat" narrowly differently for USA - it was a callback to the original comment I was answering to initially, where it was posited that a defensive alliance such as NATO cannot pose a threat to Russia, since a direct military attack by a NATO country on Russia is impossible because of nuclear deterrence. I guess I should have made it clearer that I was referencing billymorph's argument, not only yours.
My point is that all (powerful) countries generally tend to use the broad definition of threat.
> deciding suddenly to join a China-led "defensive alliance"
Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO. The fact that they were in an active border dispute with Russia would've kept them out.
Even Germany (to say nothing of more rebellious states like Hungary) was against Ukraine membership. The decision needs to be unanimous so just keeping any one country (at a time) willing to veto Ukraine's membership would keep them out.
I am close to thinking that Russia "deserved" to have a NATO-free Ukraine. But they had that already and could've kept it going indefinitely.
I must admit it's one thing that puzzled me from the beginning. Ukraine could possibly gain NATO membership very quickly if it just let Donbas and Crimea separate. And Russia has little reasons to invade. It's not like it really NEEDS this region to be a more-or-less successful European country. Its old-school Soviet-era heavy industries and mining are obsolete and useless in trade with EU, and the hit that agricultural capacity would have taken could be offset, probably. I did not believe the war would start until the very last moment - it seemed such a counter-productive move!
This almost makes me believe the version about a planned Ukrainian assault on Donbas. But not quite, since it also would be a counter-productive move - for Ukraine. I suppose there was more to the situation that one could see from the ground level. A VERY generous interpretation I have (since I like to tell myself stories about politics) is that Putin actually wanted sanctions and almost-isolation to shock the country into action, as all his previous attempts to make it move drowned in general apathy and bureaucracy and dead-locked special interests. That would be such a story-book move! And therefore, highly unlikely one, of course.
It is a threat because of the distinction between ability and intent.
NATO is an organization with a great military ability. It makes sense to be threatened by great military ability.
"Fundamentally a defensive alliance", "Prevent countries from being invaded", and so forth are descriptions of NATO's intent. To be reassured by this, Russia has to (1) be convinced that this is actually NATO's intent, and (2) accept that this intent won't change. I think that (2) is basically impossible even if we grant (1), but I also think that (1) is historically incredibly difficult to achieve.
> NATO is fundamentally a defensive alliance and so its expansion doesn't actually represent a threat
I'm pro-NATO but this argument just falls flat. I wouldn't expect Russia to accept "it's just a defensive alliance, bro!" and can't imagine lacking the theory of mind to see why they'd be suspicious.
I think what we need more than anything is some kind of consensus definition of “threat.” That seems to be a source of a lot of talking past each other.
If a “threat” is “something that presents a credible likelihood of externally imposing regime change on Russia,” then I don’t think NATO (with or without Ukraine) qualifies. No matter how strong NATO's military capabilities are, the idea of any NATO member (a) wanting to dance with Russia’s nuclear arsenal by attacking, and (b) successfully convincing the 29 other NATO members to go for it, is laughable – with or without Ukraine in the mix.
On the other hand, if a “threat” is “anything contrary to Russia’s interests, or that empowers others to act contrary to Russia’s interests,” then we’re having a different conversation.
I think that’s step 1, and then if we can figure that out we can try to pin down what level of “threat” justifies invading another country as a threat-counter. If we’re operating under something like the first definition, then a fair number of “threats” may legitimize that kind of aggression, but if we’re operating under something like the second definition, there are a whole lot of “threats” which don’t come close to justifying troops crossing borders.
On the other hand, I can't imagine any scenario in which NATO would invade Russia, if Russia stays within its own borders and behaves itself. In that sense it's a purely defensive alliance.
What I'm curious about is whether the Russians genuinely think that a NATO invasion of Russia is a plausible scenario, or whether they're being disingenuous.
I think they feel they have the right not to believe it. But they can't actually believe Nato would invade in absence of Russian aggression.
They didn't on the collapse of the soviet union and they contributed a lot of money to help Russia. They also mostly underspend on defence. They've built pipelines making them reliant on Russian gas. They've turned a blind eye to annexation in Georgia and Ukraine. Most importantly, even if they wanted to invade, Russia has loads of nukes. Plus Nato is an alliance of loads of countries who would need to agree.
In no scenario does it make sense for Nato to invade Russia without Russian aggression, and even with Russian aggression it's hard to think of a situation where Nato invades.
i’m not sure this is not a non sequiror. NATO is (mostly, ask Lybia for an exception) a defensive alliance, but that doesn’t mean people can’t feel threatened by it. like, it Mexico, Iran, North Korea, and Canada all formed a defensive alliance, and North Korean troops set up shop in British Columbia, then, even all four of those countires, for their own reasons, could plausibly want protection from American domination, America would not be happy with, and feel threatened by, the alliance— and rightly so.
of course, making Russia feel threatened, in a very specic way, is the point of NATO. the reason Mexico and North Korea aren’t in an alliance is that the US didn’t treat Mexico the way Russia treated her neighbors. Russian aggression forced eastern europe to pursue a “defnesive” alliance, which is a nice way of sayinhg “alliance that is a threat of retailation.” the threat being “you better not bully your neighbors or the we’ll hurt you.” this is a thret, and moscow rightly treats it as such. it is a justified threat, but a threat nonetheless.
Isn't whether or not NATO being fundamentally a defensive alliance just a matter of perspective?
I'm guessing that non NATO members probably view it just as a regular military alliance.
I would consider the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia an example of NATO attacking someone (regardless of whether or not it was justified).
In the cuban missile crisis, I think the USSRs stated goals were also along the lines of "defence". It seems to me to follow logically that if the US had the right to block the missiles in Cuba then Russia should also have similar rights.
Nobody was planning to put missiles in Ukraine. And the argument that someone *might* in the future runs into the existence of the Baltic states, which have been full NATO members for decades while being just as close to Moscow as Ukraine is.
Likewise, if the US had decided to go ahead and invade Cuba after the missiles got removed, the world would probably consider that a huge dick move.
Yeah, if European countries were planning to invade (in the long-term) and were lying about it, they would set up something like NATO to get everything ready, and of course lie about it.
On an object level I agree NATO isn't going to invade.
Probably the best response would be to collect similar "verbal assurances" from Russia's side during the same period, if there were any, and then compare how many of those were fulfilled.
I don't know the details about the negotiations, but I suppose the general expectation during those optimistic times was that after the fall of communism, Russia would become less of an evil empire. Don't know if any of that was said explicitly.
I found John Mearscheimer to be quite interesting.
There are several countries in the world with immense power. These powers would be wise to take each other's interests into account and anticipate each others reactions.
For example: if Russia and Cuba decided to build nuclear missile sites on cuban territory they should probably expect a reaction from the US.
I think the claims you're making explicitly here are true but quite weak, but some of the stronger claims they might be interpreted as implicit proxies for are false - neither "it would be wise to" or "should probably expect" has anything to do with moral justification or lack thereof, which is what I interpret the OP as being about.
I think though that Point D, about limiting NATO membership did invite other perspectives or explanations as to why it would not be strange to deny willing applicant countries NATO membership.
I think for example that there is a fairly reasonable realist argument for why Taiwan should not be offered NATO membership. We might not agree with that argument but i think it's quite logical at least.
I'm not certain that offering former soviet republics NATO membership made the world a safer or better place on the whole.
I'm not focussed on treaties/promises over other things, I'm simply interested to understand the arguments of both sides re the current situation, and this was one point where I couldn't find a response from one side.
I've watched Mearscheimer's youtube lecture. Of course, these powers would be wise to take each others interests/their likely reactions into account. I understand this side of the 'pro-Russia' argument, although I don't agree the examples of China or Russia plonking nukes in Cuba or Mexico are entirely equivalent.
I think Mearscheimer also simply asserts that promises were made not to expand east. I suppose his implied argument is that Russia is a great power, and thus its interests trump that of other ex-soviet states.
I think what you're missing in the above is that points 1-4 and A-D, while accurate, don't tell you most of the story as to why the war is happening in Ukraine right now or why Russia is acting the way it is. The better explanation to me is to look at it through the Mearscheimer / realpolitik lens.
What happened
Russian View
1) NATO (read America) started off as the anti USSR (Russia) alliance and now they are offering membership to our neighbors. Given that 1) NATO has intervened in other countries (Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan) and 2) defensive weapons can also be used offensively this represents a threat to us.
2) Ukraine integrating into NATO / the EU -> Ukraine takes off economically -> Ukraine itself becomes a threat to us. Countries are powerful if they have a lot of people and a lot of wealth. We don't want the have that on our borders, we want to dominate our borders. Becoming a regional hegemon is the goal (Mearscheimer's argument) - it means we are secure in the anarchic global system.
Poland GDP per capita 1990 -> 2020: $1,731 -> $15,656
Latvia GDP per capita 1995 -> 2020: $3,094 - > $17,794
Ukraine GDP per capita 1990 -> 2020: $1,570 -> $3,727
3) We don't trust NATO because of your listed 1-4 and A-D so any promises NATO makes are meaningless.
American / Western View
We like countries that look like ours, western style democracies (WSDs). Having a bunch of WSDs everywhere makes us secure because 1) WSDs (generally, I cant think of a post WW2 example) don't go to war with each other and 2) we can integrate them into our global system of institutions and trade with them. This is why we want to expand NATO and the EU.
I also think you're selling Mearscheimer's argument a bit short, I think it addresses a lot of the criticisms that I've read in this thread and elsewhere. Mearscheimer more or less says - Russia has a big military. It has a lot of people. So it is in Ukraines best interest to NOT piss of Russia. The best outcome for Ukraine is that Ukraine becomes a neutral country, with close ties to both the West and Russia, something like cold war Finland was. In Mearscheimer's opinion if the Russian's invaded Ukraine and America has to make the decision to defend / abandon we have already failed, this was a situation that could have and should have been avoided in the first place.
I believe that Mearscheimer explicitly argues that Russia is a great power and we should consider their interests when we pursue ours. Its really down to the structure of the international system - there is no higher authority to call when a nation state is out of line. Saying that Ukraine is a sovereign nation and can pursue its own interest is true, but to think that Russia is going to just stand by when Ukraine is pursuing a policy that Russia itself sees as threatening is naïve. Yes I think everyone should respect each other and I'm sure so does Mearscheimer but nation states are operating under "pursue your security and interests" and this often conflicts with other nations sovereignty. So keep we (America) should keep that in mind when pursuing foreign policy instead of basing it on how we think the world should behave.
My OP was on quite a narrow point. What's the pro-Russian (on nato promises) response to A - D?
I think your - v.good! - post is a lot broader and doesn't address those points directly, but actually highlights what the real response is. That response that can't really be spoken directly as it amounts to, "we're a big power and the countries next to us aren't, and so our interests are more important, and you (the West) should go along with that because... we're a big power and the others aren't."
Of course, maybe the West should go along with it for that reason, and no doubt the West doesn't because of self interest as much as moral principle. But I really do think that the Russian's in charge know that there's no actual, physical threat to Russia from Nato so long as they leave borders where they are. The threat is to their power and influence over other countries and their general sense of feeling like the big man... and they shouldn't start bombing cities over this.
>My OP was on quite a narrow point. What's the pro-Russian (on nato promises) response to A - D?
If you're looking for a narrowly tailored pro-Russia response to A-D I'm not sure there is one, I don't think Russians / pro-Russians fundamentally care about those questions. They might even concede to your points. I just don't think it factors too much into their decision making besides them not trusting NATOs word. To them NATO is a threat, that vastly outweighs whatever should or should not be expected from a verbal promise or treaty or who should morally be allowed to join which clubs.
My above comment was more in response to your later comment (below):
>I'm not focussed on treaties/promises over other things, I'm simply interested to understand the arguments of both sides re the current situation, and this was one point where I couldn't find a response from one side.
>That response that can't really be spoken directly as it amounts to, "we're a big power and the countries next to us aren't, and so our interests are more important, and you (the West) should go along with that because... we're a big power and the others aren't."
Russia is a big power, with nukes. To an extent we have to think about their concerns when we (the US) is pursuing its own foreign policy. I agree with you, there is no fairness or morality to this, but this is what happens in the international system. And I think that we should be pursuing our own foreign policy with that in mind, according to how the system DOES work, and not how we think the system SHOULD work. To me (really Mearscheimer but I agree) if we pursued the policy based on how the system DOES work then we would have recognized Russia would not tolerate NATO in Ukraine. We would not have encouraged Ukraine to join NATO and pushed for a neutral Ukraine, integrated with both Russia and the West. I'm really just agreeing with Mearscheimer here, his opinion on this is below. You did reference one of his videos, so maybe this wasn't convincing to you and we disagree. But it was to me.
And to add / regurgitate Mearscheimer - I don't think that "we are big and important, others aren't" is the the best way to frame it if you want to understand the Russian side. I think the better framing (better in the sense that it tells you more about Russia's actions) is that Russia sees NATO as a security threat for reasons 1 & 2 I posted above. I think the security framing tells us more because the two countries Russia has invaded, Ukraine & Georgia, were told in the 2008 Budapest memo they could join NATO (per Mearscheimer). And what then what happened - Georgia got invaded soon after the memo and then Crimea got annexed in 2014 immediately after the pro-West Maidan Revolution.
>Of course, maybe the West should go along with it for that reason, and no doubt the West doesn't because of self interest as much as moral principle. But I really do think that the Russian's in charge know that there's no actual, physical threat to Russia from Nato so long as they leave borders where they are. The threat is to their power and influence over other countries and their general sense of feeling like the big man... and they shouldn't start bombing cities over this.
I do not think NATOs plan was to leave the borders where they were, I think NATOs plan was to expand the borders into Ukraine and Georgia, again see the 2008 Budapest memo. Russia saw this as a threat. If you disagree fine. But ultimately its not up to me or you what is a threat to Russian security, its up to Russia. Only Russia gets to determine that, ultimately they are going to act on their own formulations not ours.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite work because there is nothing we could have done, including fully rebuffing Ukraine's overtures to the West and having the CIA assassinate Zelensky in favor of a pro-neutrality leader, that would have stopped this invasion. I find it very interesting that a lot of people in the rationalist community are so driven to frame Putin's invasion as being rooted in cold-blooded clear-headed realpolitik even as Russia tells the rest of the world over and over in increasingly tall burning letters "OUR INTEREST IN UKRAINE IS IDEOLOGICAL AND DRIVEN BY PUTIN'S EXTREME ETHNO-NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY" and Russia's government tries to speedrun proving Orwell's statement about Nazism returning under the guise of anti-Nazism right. It strikes me as being very similar to the academics who insisted that ISIS weren't REALLY driven by a totalitarian interpretation of Islam so extremist it made Wahabism look stable- they were just anti-imperialists, and as soon as the US and Israel stopped meddling in the ME everything would go fine and dandy for the Arabic states.
> I feel like this argument doesn't quite work because there is nothing we could have done, including fully rebuffing Ukraine's overtures to the West and having the CIA assassinate Zelensky in favor of a pro-neutrality leader, that would have stopped this invasion.
I do think this could have been avoided if we listened to Russia's protests about NATO expansion. I haven't seen much evidence that Russia was aggressively expanding outside its borders until the 2008 Bucharest memorandum and Georgia invasion, to me it seems we were largely cooperating with Russia. Maybe you are aware of something I am not? If so I'm interested in reading it.
> I find it very interesting that a lot of people in the rationalist community are so driven to frame Putin's invasion as being rooted in cold-blooded clear-headed realpolitik even as Russia tells the rest of the world over and over in increasingly tall burning letters "OUR INTEREST IN UKRAINE IS IDEOLOGICAL AND DRIVEN BY PUTIN'S EXTREME ETHNO-NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY"
Personally its because he has also been saying that his interest in Ukraine is to stop Westernization and NATO, and he has been saying that for a lot longer time. I'm sure that there is some ideology involved in the decision but that just seems a lot less compelling of a reason to me than not wanting a hostile alliance on your border, in a country where you have been invaded through twice in the previous century. Both of which resulted in millions of deaths.
This is what I am aware of. The second this book was published, everybody should have updated their priors about what motivates Putin. I don't believe this is some kind of elaborate double-bluff or smokescreen., but instead Putin giving explicit revealed preferences. The rest of the Russian State's media has been repeating the arguments within verbatim and expanding on them, continuously driving home the concept that there is no difference between the Ukrainian national identity, their ethnicity, their culture, and Nazism.
To reiterate: Putin explicitly says "there is no Ukraine, there are no Ukrainians, Ukrainian culture is a lie, these people are merely Russians." Russian state media has clearly and repeatedly outlined a policy of 'Deukrainization" that involves the destruction of Ukrainian historical artifacts, texts, and buildings and a mass reeducation of the populace. Ukrainians in the Donbass region are being relocated to concentration camps in Russia where, if we are to take Russian state media's claims the appropriate amount of seriously, they are being relieved of their delusions that they are Ukrainians instead of Russian subjects that are clinging to an intrinsically-evil national identity and culture. Russia's constitution has been revised to explicitly tie the Russian state as being fundamentally founded on "the civilization-building nature of the Russian ethnicity" (not directly related, but germane to the point). Russian textbooks are being revised to remove mentions of Ukraine as ever having existed independently from Russia even back to the days of the Kievan Rus (this is part of a larger push to center New Chronology, the Lysenkoism of history, as the mainstream Russian narrative on history despite it being a manifestation of psychosis). Russian state media now openly calls for an eschatological war against the entire West, using explicitly apocalyptic language ("We may all die, but we will go to Heaven while they will just rot.") According to you, all of this is being done purely to combat perceived NATO aggression.
For once, and I cannot believe I am saying this, I am in agreement with trebuchet: if none of this convinces you that Russian state is embracing extreme ideological ethno-nationalism at a rapid rate and is making decisions based on this ideology rather than realpolitik, what WOULD?
I think that's because moral realism becomes a lot less palatable when it starts boiling down to "too bad, so sad, we should just let Russia commit cultural genocide against former USSR republics because that's the way of the world." I mean, that technically DOES optimize for peace if you don't define cultural genocide as violence...
A lot of Rationalism, to its credit, is not realist in the sense that it believes the way the world currently is is not how the world has to be and we shouldn't just accept, for example, that people starving to death in third-world countries while one meal in five is thrown out in the US is just how things are.
It doesn't even optimize for peace in the long run, since it just means Russia gains increasing ability to continue expanding. If you don't fight in Kiev, you'll soon be fighting in Berlin.
The realist position isn't that we should just let Russia do whatever they want to their sphere of influence / Ukraine. The realist position was that Russia was not a threat to us prior to ~2008, they were not being aggressive. The realists (Kennon, Kissinger, Mearscheimer) all said that expanding NATO east was a bad idea and that it would provoke Russia. For Ukraine in particular Mearscheimer's position is that the best outcome was that Ukraine becomes a neutral country with strong ties to the West & Russia. After Russia becomes an antagonist this becomes really hard, especially after 2014. Neutrality lets them grow their economy and not get invaded. More or less in the same boat as cold war Finland. And then we (USA) can be friends with Russia to contain China.
Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But I think you should at least listen to what the realists are advocating for FROM the realists (and not some anon) before you write it off.
There is a lot of focus on the moral aspect - rightly, I think. But there's lots of realist perspectives/discussion too. "We need to keep the gas on", "Putin only responds to strength", "We must avoid nuclear war", "appeasement leads to worse problems" etc.
Russia right now isn't so much a country as much as it is a territory of a specific clique that's been in control for a decade and a half. It doesn't have national interests right now, it just has the interests of Putin's cronies having suppressed all political opposition, and now it isn't about a 'zone of influence', it's really about preventing any ex-Soviet nations from demonstrating that they're capable of transitioning away from authoritarian militarism, the only type of politics those siloviki-involved people have any future under. 'Large' and 'powerful' these days is mainly a question of the economy and just look at Russia's, proportionate to its size. I'm saying this as someone with relatives there: Russia got a really bad case of brainworms which ate their host from the inside out and are now trying to spread onto other places. They get threatened by any shows of ex-Soviet states' own immune systems flaring up and suddenly rejecting the larvae already injected into them - for Ukraine it was the "Euromaidan". US and China, whatever their flaws are at least have some manner of a functional economies, Russia is trying to find ways to keep pure rot going.
And just in case: it's a country where 80% don't speak a second non-EE language while every information channel in the native tongue was turned into state-controlled propaganda. The population has no idea what the world actually looks like, not even what their own country does, same case can be made for Putin as he's reported to by his own corrupt subordinates. USSR was bad enough, he managed to turn what's left into a shambling zombie. I don't think he even had the popularity to win elections for the past two cycles if not for being able to just write in favorable results as a result of usurping the entirety of the state apparatus.
"Want" is different from "need" or "deserve." I think that's the source of a lot of the confusion here. Large, powerful heavily armed countries want lots of things, damn near unlimited things.
There's this shallow reading of Mearscheimer that seems to be going around, where people take the very reasonable-sounding premise "great powers should consider the sphere of influence that other great powers want, and would be wise to expect conflict when those spheres overlap" and stretch it to "Russia wants to control Ukraine, but Ukraine doesn't want to be controlled by Russia, and NATO made it easier for Ukraine to resist, so NATO is in conflict with Russia's wants and therefore this war is really all NATO's fault." Which is basically the geopolitical version of my neighbor telling me he wouldn't have to beat his kids so hard if I hadn't called the cops on him.
It's also easy to abuse. "We have to accept reality" seems innocuous and obvious, but the way a lot of pro-Russian advocates use it, "accepting reality" means "letting Russia do whatever it wants because whatever Russia says it believes is real is real for Russia."
Which is great if you're Russia and you want to invade other countries and then just say "tHis Is HIS fAuLT i waS sCarED," but for everybody else at the table it's just a postmodern approach to kneecapping your own negotiating position
Congrats, you got it right: 1 to 4 + A to D. This will not stop Lavrov's army of Putin-Trolls (+ useful "slightly-less-smarts") to claim the opposite. Read them on quora, in comments of other media, if convoluted agitation is your thing. - Pardon, if I did not get your question right. I am friendly, mostly. :) If you could elaborate in case I misunderstood?- (And yes, there are some smart and honest people, who are seeing Nato as an aggressor even in the context of Putin. Harder to explain. Chomsky, the German Dieter Nuhr, ... . A form of imprinting? )
Chomsky is very, very old now and as always: "war wrong and USofA to blame" (which sometimes does fit). Dieter Nuhr is a German comedian (politics, stand-up and TV), co-founded the Green party, left them, dislikes Greta Th. - so neither woke nor QAnon. Still he signed now a letter to our government, not to send heavier weapons to Ukraine. Because: peace/not provoking WW3. What I consider a Putin-troll-position, shared only by the ignorant sort of pacifists. Do I have to update? I updated 1938. :/ As a good boy, I should listen, at least. Just to confirm my bias.
Maybe they got so used to taking the contrarian position, they're doing the opposite of the mainstream by reflex? Something like "Everybody's saying X, so I have to say Y just so the public discourse is being kept as diverse as possible".
Either that or just plain paid to say so. Nobody can say it's paranoia anymore, after looking at Schroder. If we have a former chancellor publicly choosing Russia's job, statistically there pretty much have to be lots of less preeminent others doing the same.
Gerhard Schröder was like Bill. C.: always laser-focused on the economy and the ladies. A German ex-chancellor will not get rich by selling his biography or giving speeches. So when Putin offered him a job in 2005 - that made Schröder 20 mln. richer by now, I can understand. - That NYT article was actually good. No new insights, realy. - I felt shocked and angry in 2005, but in hindsight I am glad it was publicly, at least. (And Merkel was in charge all those 16 years.) Putin is smart: why buy an aircraft-carrier, when western politicians come so much cheaper! Le Pen. Anti-frackers. Salvini. AfD. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-germany-russia-gas-ukraine-war-energy.html - Sorry, Scott! As the WP, the NYT is usu. a dark force. Schröder was just too vain to not give the NYT an interview. He had turned down all lesser papers.
Is there a way to view the Substack archive in the order the posts were published (or just any way remotely more convenient than the standard option)? I am just about caught up on SSC, and scrolling through the whole ACT archive to start from the beginning seems a little ineffective.
Heh, I was just about to ask that when I saw this — like, formed the exact same intention within about 60 seconds of coincidentally seeing this comment.
My view of politics in the United States is that the country is fairly evenly divided into two groups: Republicans and Democrats. Each group considers the other group to be a threat to the nation, and their most important political goal is to stop the other group from succeeding.
Now in my mind this is a recipe for failure of the United States. I believe the two-party system is the true threat to the nation.
I have been thinking about this a lot and devising a possible solution. The sad irony is that given our political stalemate, the solution is impossible to implement. But if you are willing to imagine the best possible electoral system for the United States (not just the puny changes currently possible), please read this proposal and share your thoughts with me.
Approximately all of the American people in the world we live in today, would look on that system and say "this is a *TRAP*, it has been set by [evil other party] to divide and conquer the beleaguered coalition that is our last, best hope for goodness. The only way we can prevail is to remain faithful to the one true [good party] and not be fooled into wasting our votes on one of the splinter factions set out to tempt us with false promises. Our trusted leaders will tell us which candidates/electors/whatever constitute the one true [good party]".
A system like you describe *might* have prevented the American electorate from becoming as polarized as it presently is, but it won't depolarize it.
John, I'm sorry I didn't see your comment until a few days ago. HOW we move from what we have to something quite different is an unanswered question. My gut feeling is that some period of turmoil would precede it.
I don't think this proposal has any value at all, because it misunderstands the dynamics that caused the two party system to come into existence in the first place. It seems to imagine that the two parties exist because the population is split into two groups. It therefore proposes that through a clever electoral system, it could divide up the population into many different groups, and the outcome would therefore be a much more diverse Congress.
This logic fails in two places.
(1) American voters don't decide their identity based on the mechanics of how elections work. Those identities are much broader, and come from the media, family socialisation, broad understandings of history, etc. Therefore you can't manipulate political identity simply by tinkering with the electoral system.
(2) The processes that lead to the formation of two parties is not a binary split in the population. The causation runs the other way. The binary split in the population emerges because of the binary split in Congress. And the binary split in Congress emerges because politics is very complicated, most legislation requires a 51% vote to get through Congress, so rather than try to understand the complexities of everyone's position, people form up into two rough groupings each representing about 50% of legislators.
The two-party system is a natural emergent property of a legislative body that uses majority voting; and in fact is a natural emergent property of pretty much any political system. You can't change that with fancy voting systems alone.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it looks like your point #2 contradicts point #1. I agree with point 2, that our electoral system created the binary split in the population. But point 1 seems to say that sort of thing can't happen.
Yeah, I didn't put that clearly enough. What I meant was: lots and lots of factors combine to create the binary split. That includes the media, education, social identities, interacting with the majority-rule mechanism within the legislature (or more generally, within government). The process by which legislators are selected is not a very important factor.
As evidence, look at countries with proportional representation, where you get lots more political parties, each with their specialist focus; but you still get a split into two broad camps, left and right. A diverse mechanism of legislator selection does not change the basis two-way split dynamic. Germany gets gridlock, too!
(It's possible that the German system is better than the American system; but if it is, that's not because Germany doesn't have a left and a right wing.)
It's not clear to me this would actually decrease the amount of polarization in our society, or the power of parties.
Just to take myself - currently I am a Democrat, and I would sign up for the electoral group that is closest to "we're the successor to the Democratic party" (both ideologically, and in terms of size). I imagine many others would do the same and you'd end up with two large electoral groups, except now by eliminating direct elections for anything and limiting group-switching to certain times, you've strengthened the leadership of the groups.
As for why I'd do that - you mention the idea of a pro-union group, that would have strong pro-union ideals but not necessarily any predetermined views on other stuff. It's exactly this reason I would NOT vote for a group like that. I would feel like I am throwing away my influence on any other issue. I want my views to be reflected in my representatives, I don't want someone who will reflect a narrow subset of my views and roll the dice on the rest.
Now you might have a situation where e.g. instead of a "Democratic Party" group you had 3 subgroups, something like "moderate Democrat", "liberal" and "woke progressive" and perhaps I'd vote for the middle one. But similar basic idea, and I'd expect the three to generally vote as a bloc for President, and form a bloc in Congress. In that case I think it's not so different from Israel or the UK, except there switching is easier, and UK is also (like the US now) geography-based.
It's also not clear to me in this system how the groups choose their leadership, or if it's left totally up to them.
Because you have 120 million incompatible ideas about what that party would do, and at least 110 million of you would defect in one way or another as soon as that became clear.
Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'll try to address everything, but it will take more than one reply. Here is the list of sugested groups, but you can add more.
The list of suggested groups doesn't change anything that I said. I don't know if these groups would have significant membership or not, but either way I'm likely to be in the largest left-of-center group that's the successor to the Democratic Party, and have no interest in the others. Also to answer your question, none.
I actually think that you should look at what Israel's system is, it is similar in some ways to what you are proposing. Parties run slates of candidates for office, people vote for parties instead of individuals, and parties gain seats in their Parliament (the Knesset) proportionally to the number of votes.
So if I am in charge of a party ("The Sorensenists"), I publish the list of people we want to send to the Knesset - number 1 is me, number 2 is Bill Sorensen, number 3 is Jane Sorensen, etc. Then if the Sorensenists get 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats, which is 12 seats, and the first 12 people on the list go to the Knesset. Whoever can get 61 votes of the 120 in the Knesset to be the Prime Minister, is the Prime Minister.
It is similar to your proposal in that people vote for parties, not people. Different in that you vote for a party on election day, you don't sign up to support them in advance. Also different in that it's a Prime Minister not a President.
And it does have the effect of reducing the power of parties, and definitely doesn't result in a two party system.
Having electors and direct voting is a huge difference. Now if your list of Sorensenists were electors not legislators, that would make the two systems comparable.
Hmm, I started reading your thoughts, but didn't finish. IMHO our congress has given away it's power to the executive branch. Power means making decisions, and making decisions pisses some people off, so congress doesn't want to do that if they want to be reelected. Term limits would help with this... which I see you propose. Term limits in congress would be good, but I don't see congress voting for that. I think changing the constitution (Constitutional convention) is a can of worms that we really don't want to open at this point. So I'd like some idea as to how we get congress to take back it's power... I don't know how to do that.
If things continue to get worse for the average American, you will receive a demonstration of a very effective idea- violence. We got to see the faintest whiff of a preview of what that might look like on Jan. 6th.
That seems like an odd line to draw. I just looked up the list of former Senators who became President, and it doesn't seem like an especially bad list. Mostly pretty middle of the road with one or two exceptions in either direction
It's not that the people who became Senators were bad. It's that people doing performative stuff in the Senate to plan for a Presidential run is part of Congress being dysfunctional.
Three *sitting* senators. 17 former senators have gone on to become president in total. Many more have *attempted* to become president. The problem with senators running for president, as Edward Scissorhands said, is not that they make bad presidents but that being focused on their future presidential ambitions makes them bad senators. Whether those ambitions ever come to fruition or not is irrelevant to the impact on their time in the Senate.
Lots of stuff gets passed in Congress, even now. The issue is that both parties have large enough contingents of what the other side (and much of the middle) considers "crazies" who demand truly unpalatable things. So Congress doesn't pass those things, and a lot more of the political commentary and discussion is about those things. Passing the biggest entitlements package in American history (bigger than the New Deal) with a 50/50 Senate is not a reasonable expectation. Even a 60/40 Senate should have backed down from that kind of massive rearranging of society. Similarly, scrapping the ACA with no replacement and no plan was not going to happen either.
Both parties use the opposition of the other party to rile up votes, while generally not actually wanting to pass much if any of the legislation that fails. Stuff that the parties truly want, generally make it through. It's not a healthy situation, because it leaves large groups of Americans with the impression that their legislation goals are actually reasonable, if not for that pesky opposition. Unrealistic goals should be identified as such and shot down within the party that's trying to bring it up, but that makes some voters mad and therefore politicians are reluctant to do that. That's the real issue, not that Congress is "gridlocked" or can't pass anything.
I am doubtful, but find myself more than sympathetic to the side of Congress that would keep it from passing (which also includes a good number of Democrats). There are issues in the US system that seem sufficiently different from most of the rest of the world that a universal system would likely work less well or be more expensive, or both. I am quite skeptical that a universal system would work as intended, within our current system.
I do agree that healthcare in the US is all kinds of messed up, but that seems well beyond the scope of UHC-fixable problems, while introducing a different set of problems.
Could you talk a little more about the issues you think are extremely different in the US compared to the rest of the world?
That is, if I could wave a magic wand and replace every single element of the US healthcare system with a UK-style NHS system, is your view that the new NHS-in-US system would collapse because of US-specific factors? Or is it more that the historical path to creating a universal system couldn't be followed in the US because it has fallen into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium?
I could see a couple of elements of US-specific factors that could be important - you have a generally less healthy population than Europe and the market dynamics of pharmaceutical companies are heavily embedded in a US-style system (such that I could see an argument that pharma innovation would stagnate if I waved the hypothetical magic wand). But I can't really think of anything that would make me as confident as you that it is impossible (although I accept you are only modestly confident anyway!)
It sounds like you and I are aware of the same factors. "Suboptimal institutional equilibrium" is a good term for the biggest factor, in my mind. I wouldn't say the problems are unfixable, but I do feel strongly that switching to a UHC system will not automatically fix it and will therefore start out under the same suboptimal conditions we already have. I feel like the left-leaning states that tried to set up a UHC system and failed ran squarely into those problems, and the verdict was "completely unworkable" and then scrapping the attempt. California's plan would have cost something like 2X+ their entire state budget to implement (tripling the budget or more) and was clearly not workable.
I also agree about Americans being generally less healthy and that pharmaceutical situation that would be smaller but still significant issues.
A plausible answer, although not one I'm well-informed enough to be confident in, might point at some combination of rising ideological polarisation, decline in ticket splitting, decline in local media and the corresponding nationalisation of what would previously have been local issues, decline in bipartisanship in the senate and congress (with associated unwillingness to cross party lines to pass legislation), and an increase in the number of people who say they would not want to marry or be friends with someone from the other party.
One step back from that, another plausible-but-unproven answer to why those things have changed recently is "the internet".
“ If he wants to become an electrician, that's wonderful! The only problem is... I have no idea how to help him do that! As a university-attender myself, I know advice and procedures on how to do that. And while it was kind of expected of me, I have my own questions about the value of it both on its own, and compared to the costs. But when he asks me how to become an electrician, well, I just don't know!”
Since at DSL I am banned at my own request till June I can’t respond there soon, I suppose I’ll and I ask others to pass on the info to DSL, thanks if you do:
@no one special,
The aptitude tests to be an apprentice electrician in most counties locals is similar to the test to be an apprentice plumber but typically the IBEW has additional tests for English language skills while the UA stresses arithmetic more, regardless being able to do multiple choice arithmetic problems very quickly will be the core of the tests, your son should throughly practice that, there will also be tests for “spatial relations” and “mechanical aptitude” and a little practice on those is good, but arithmetic is the most important.
For higher paying more urban counties a high school diploma is a requirement, a GED isn’t an acceptable substitute, so complete high school, or test out, but do not drop out. More rural locals will accept a GED, but a drug test will be required instead.
Some locals will just accept apprentices based on their scores on the tests but most will interview as well, at one Union local the question was “Who do you know?” but for others it was “Do you have a reliable car?”, and “Are you used to working outside lifting heavy things?”.
Christopher Mims's 'Keywords" column in this weekend's WSJ creeps me out.
It's about Apple building its own modems. That isn't the creepy part. But the phrasing Mims uses in describing the technology for "always-on smart glasses and augmented reality, more wearables with their own independent connection to cellular networks" and a "computer-generated reality atop the real world" that gets me.
A new, improved version of reality will be overlaid on the natural world. How clever.
Isn't it bad enough that perceptions of public reality are systemically and professionally manufactured by those with the deepest pockets? Now some want to escape biological consciousness altogether. Alcohol, designer drugs and ridiculously video-gaming aren't enough escape.
Isn't putting on a headset in a gravity-free recliner with some kind of lens projecting 'augmented reality' into your eyes a bit narcissistic? I mean, there could be a cute-looking girl next door who's equally desperate.
"Now some want to escape biological consciousness altogether." What exactly is the problem with this outside of the naturalistic ick factor? Evolution is pretty much a Lovecraftian deity, its details tend to be terrifying when inspected - those who want to escape its grasp should be able to.
I don't see how VR is "escaping consciousness" any more than reading a book is. Your consciousness is, well, whatever you're consciously experiencing, whether that's text on a page, images on a headset, or yes, a cute girl next door.
Also, augmented reality isn't the same thing as virtual reality. It's almost the opposite, really - it's technology that requires people to go outside and look at things (and perhaps meet a cute girl who's out doing the same) to gain its benefit. AR is stuff like Google Glass or Pokemon Go.
You could make this kind of argument about any sort of life-improving intervention. Eating fancy food made from *recipes*, with *spices* and shit? What, venison and tubers weren't enough to escape? There could be a cute girl in the next tribe over out hunting right now!
That said, the point about letting certain people increasingly define reality for one's self and the rest of the normie masses is somewhat worrying, yes.
Venison? I'm just sayin if consciousness is so bad, why not fix the context or approach, rather than do a swan dive into lala land? If we just give up on the mess we've created, and try and walk away, we'll turn into a bunch of self-focused, isolated escapists in a neglected, abandoned landscape.
Point well made. If one is fleeing warfare after hiding for weeks in a basement shelter, an out-of-body electronic escape just might save her or him from a breakdown.
Depending on where we are drawing lines, living in "reality" is how you justify your existence in a world of scarcity.
I.e. adding value to the shared computation/work that is society and and the economy, via virtual or real means, but not the void of escapism that simulated realities may represent
I just do what I want and think what I want about it; and part of that assumption is that whatever I do is an Authentic Real Experience (tm) or Authentic Real Thought(tm) by way of me not giving a shit, and everyone else is doing some sort of weird internal status game bullshit or likewise not giving a shit.
This is staggeringly arrogant and cannot be defended. I am also 100% sure it's true.
Basically: If you give a shit about something being authentic, real, narcissistic, etc: It is impossible for you to not enact those worries.
It's one of those annoying "the only way to have a thing is to not want it" style of problems.
For example: I am entertaining myself during a meeting by typing this up. I don't actual care if you read it or agree, beyond the pleasure interacting with people brings me.
Even if you never see this, it's fine, because I'm writing it for myself. To kill time while running my brain in neutral, so to speak.
Hang on, what's reality? Suppose you're living in a simulation, whether on a computer, or in a demon's imagination. Or maybe you're basically god, and this is all your imagination, following strictly-defined rules.
Reality is whatever you exist in. So that's a bit circular. Rather, let us observe that reality is the context in which we exist.
If you live in VR, is that less legitimate? Well, supposing you live in a simulation, then making another simulation inside the simulation a major part of your context doesn't really change much, does it? Except insofar as somebody attaches meaning to -this- context and not -that- context, which, once we notice that meaning-attachment is itself subjective - it's just deciding one version of the context is better than another version of the context - ends up not cashing out to anything.
Okay, so, we live in the context we live in, and the context we live in can be modified; I enjoy a context which is slightly cooler than what somebody else might term "reality", so I have air conditioning. A more authentic experience seems, here, to cash out to being slightly miserable on a perpetual basis.
That's kind of where your response ends up cashing out for most people; that you want them to live without the things that make their lives less miserable. Basically, on some level, so they're motivated to make their now-more-miserable-lives less miserable in a context which you approve of.
Now, I'm sure you actually have a "deep" meaning for what "authentic" means, but the thing is, "authentic" doesn't mean the same things to every person. And for some people, "authentic" involves some extremely anti-social behavior. Go watch Poker Night, although it's an absolutely terrible, no-fun-even-to-make-fun-of movie; you can stop when you see the sticky note on the wall, detailing the villain's goals. That, right there, is what authenticity means. Also the smile of a child seeing a butterfly for the first time, granted - but the juxtaposition of those things kind of just makes authenticity worse, not better.
Now, it's entirely possible that's not what you mean at all. But in that case, I am going to assert that your version of authenticity is basically another McLifestyle.
I think your label of "McLifestyle" is ill-defined, then.
If you live in VR, that is less legitimate because it is a shallow simulacrum. You are limited by the rules of that world, and ignore the deeper rules lying underneath. All your struggles are in an imaginary, limited context - you have no way to change the paradigm because you're too invested in the paradigm, and the paradigm was set by someone else anyway, probably a corp that wants to profit from you. There is so much value you leave on the table, because you cannot perceive most of opportunities around you (much like OP's girl next door). If the VR ever fails you'll be ejected into a real world you can no longer navigate. There are physical needs you must attend to, supported by an economy and society you can no longer engage in.
I wouldn't say there is anything inauthentic in living with air conditioning, but there is something inauthentic in forgetting air conditioning is a thing, assuming air conditioning will always be present wherever you go, and in refusing to go outside because there's no air conditioning there, regardless of potential gain.
If you live in the real world, that is less legitimate because it is the result of chance rather than choice. You are limited by the rules of the world, and ignore the deeper rules of autonomy. All your struggles are in a limited, arbitrary context - you have no way to change the paradigm because you're too invested in the paradigm, and the paradigm was set by reality itself, which doesn't care about your happiness or survival at all. There is so much value you leave on the table, because you cannot perceive most of opportunities around you (like a VR girlfriend). As the rest of the world moves into VR, you'll be late to a virtual world you never learned to navigate. There are virtual requirements you will need to attend to, supported by a virtual context you cannot engage in.
There have been several comments here in the last few weeks explaining why nuclear war is unlikely to literally kill everyone.
To what extent is this because of arms controls treaties? What fraction of the human population would be killed if a full-scale nuclear war broke out today, compared to if a full-scale nuclear war broke out in the late 1980s when nuclear stockpiles were at their largest?
If these two numbers are significantly different from each other, then nuclear arms control treaties need to be celebrated a lot more.
It's complicated. Of course the fact that there are now ~3,000 warheads instead of ~30,000 or more means significantly less loss of life and ecological damage, although what we've got left is still plenty to do terrible things.
When the most significant of those treaties (START I) was hammered into final form in 1990-91 the world had just changed enormously -- the Wall had come down the year before, and the USSR was about to go out of existence -- and most people thought there was hardly any need for nuclear weapons at all. So the reduction by ~75% or so wasn't greated with joy at the time, because it seemed if anything too timid.
Now we live in a different world, of course, and yes it would make some kind of sense for us to be grateful for the fact that Reagan, Bush Sr, and M. Gorbacheve left us with way fewer weapons than were around in 1985 (and subsequent efforts led to still more reductions), although one would also expect the more aggressive and fearful demographics in both the US and Russia being more annoyed than grateful.
The sad fact is that the utility of a treaty that reduces nuclear weapons to any number greater than zero (or close to it) is always kind of marginal and unsatisfying, sort of a lesser of two evils kind of thing, because if the event of war you still get a pretty horrific level of destruction.
Ukraine did cut back to zero. Seems in "the event of war you still get a pretty horrific level of destruction". - I much prefer a world with a few hundred warheads to one without any. Turned out safer and more peaceful - in the mean. N: years since 1945. (Sure, we have a around ten thousand now, suboptimal, but still better than zero, I'd say.)
An interesting speculation. However there is unfortunately no empirical evidence at all that the number of nuclear wars scales with the number of nuclear weapons, since the domain here is [0,30000] roughtly and the range is [0,0]. Difficult to draw a straight line through that data.
Indeed, there is a certain amount of evidence to the contrary -- more precisely, there is some historical evidence that the number of wars scales inversely with the number of nuclear weapons, if you extend your data plot back to, say, 1914. The number of wars, both large and small, has fallen significantly since the invention of the atomic bomb.
Also, I'm pretty sure the Ukrainians bitterly regret cutting back their number of nukes to zero. Had they kept even 5, sufficient to wipe out Moscow, we can be pretty confident neither the 2014 nor the current invasion would have taken place.
If cutting the number of warheads in half would save hundreds of millions of lives in the case of a nuclear war, then I don't think that's marginal.
I agree that there is not nearly as much popular support for arms control treaties now as there was in 1990-91. But maybe we could increase support if we publicized what (potential) good they've done more.
Sure, and someone who lives in DC or Seattle, and would be very likely to die even in a "small" nuclear war, could console himself with the fact that people in rural Kentucky will now be spared -- but you can see how that is in the "silver lining" not "huzzah!" category.
Edit: I don't want to add to the usual nuclear hysteria by saying this, though. I don't think the destruction that would be visited on the US in an all-out nuclear war with Russia would even be as bad, proportionately, as what Japan or Germany suffered during the Second World War. Ordinary TNT is darn destructive, too, when you use enough of it. But destruction on that scale has rarely been seen, and most of those who have witnessed it firsthand are now gone. It's not clear as nations and peoples we have any kind of good instincts in understanding it -- understanding what it's really like, and what kinds of risks we are willing to take for our aims that balance it. I don't think the answer is "no risk at all" or "any risk" but I increasingly doubt the ability of the present generations to suss it out rationally -- because the real-world experience of war at that level is gone, or nearly gone, from living memory.
I mean, Vladimir Putin is kind of Exhibit A. I doubt very much any Soviet leader after Stalin would consider what he can achieve in the Ukraine at this point worth even a small risk of Russian civilization and culture being obliterated -- and yet he continue to toss around casually the threat of nuclear war, which is either insane or insincere, and either one is a disgrace to his position.
Even Stalin would not, I think, risk nuclear war over Putin's pathetic currently achievable war aims. Stalin would have disdained the picayune, dreamed much larger, and probably *would* have been willing to have a nuclear war over control over the entirety of Europe. But not over just the Donbas plus Crimea, I think, or even the whole of Ukraine.
There was and is zero "risk of Russia(n civilization and culture)* being obliterated" by Putins invasion-turned-debacle. Before the invasion NATO governments all loudly said, they would not go to (even conventional) war over Ukraine. Very much "peace in our time"-like. (*Putin seems to be working hard on obliterating both, though.)
If Putin resorted to tactical nukes, that would all change. I don't think we should go war over Russia using tactical nukes against Ukraine, but the nuclear taboo is such that even the coolest heads would be lost in such a scenario. I think its very unlikely Putin would use tactical nukes, but I thought it was very unlikely he would be foolish enough to invade Ukraine in the first place, so who knows.
Dream on. Joe Biden doesn't have that much longer to live, and he really doesn't like the Russians, never has. He's just about senile enough to push the loud button if given modest provocation, and Putin is just stupid enough to supply it. Between the two of these goofballs the risk is much further above zero than it should be.
Nuclear arms control treaties, and the end of the cold-war alliance structure where almost every nation was a likely target, have probably reduced the expected death toll in an all-out nuclear war by a billion or more people. But there wasn't a risk of literal human extinction even at Peak Cold War; neither global fallout nor nuclear winter would render the whole of the Earth's surface uninhabitable, and there would have been many, many towns full of people that didn't see so much as a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
Then and now, the biggest factor is probably that disruption of the world's industrial economy would greatly reduce the scale of industrialized agriculture, and without e.g. industrial-scale fertilizer production, much less food will be grown. So there's probably going to be famine. But there's also going to be a whole lot of farmland, most of it really, that isn't blasted, burned, irradiated, or frozen to any great degree. Whatever food can be grown on that land without trainloads of fertilizer, etc, would feed surviving humans.
In the modern era, destruction won't be so total as to shut down all the world's big fertilizer plants. With Cold War arsenals, you'd deliberately target(*) those if only because they can easily be repurposed to build explosives, and you don't want people you don't trust to be mass-producing explosives in a World War. And with ten thousand megaton-scale warheads, you don't have to. With only one thousand warheads and those sub-megaton, fertilizer plants won't be deliberately targeted and are less likely to be incidentally blown up or have their necessary supporting infrastructure destroyed.
* in the sense of "double-check that it's in the blast radius of some warhead assigned to that general area", not "make it ground zero"
what I’m not sure if I udnerstand is the affect that supply chains have on all of this. suppose that the US, Russia and/or China get in a nuclear war, but Kansas is perfectly fine because why would you nuke Kansas. so the farmers get on their combines to harvest the wheat. except wait, their isn’t any fuel because most of the major refineries were hit. and even if there was once your equipment broke there is no way it gets fixed because all the parts would have to be shipped through a coastal port, of which there are few left— and those that are are probablly being used to ship essential supplies for what remains of the miitary. and, if the war invovled anti satalite missles or people intentionally cutting fiber optic cables under the ocean, which would make stratgic sense, its possible you couldn’t even get on the internet to order supplies in the first palce. basically, your community could only survive if you had the ability to farm by hand (since even if you can generaate electricity to power things good luck repalcing your batteries when they die) with whatever tools you could make from the scrap metal around you.
like, I guess maybe people in less develped parts of the world, where this type of farming is only a few generations in the past, would be fine, but I don’t see many north Americans being able to become fully self sufficent in that way.
Note that Americans produce roughly twice as much food as they need, so there's plenty of slack in the system. If the result of World War III is that three hundred million people starve for lack of American-grown food, it won't be Americans who starve.
Note also that farmers are not narrowly-specialized automatons who can only farm the one way they presently do. If they don't have nitrate fertilizer, they still have the old textbooks from A&M that explain how to use manure and four-course crop rotation. If the oil refineries are all gone, then they know how to turn some of their crops into biodiesel so that they can get the rest to harvest and to market. And they know how to fix tractors without OEM parts if they have to. Well, OK, not every one of them knows all of that, but they know a guy who knows a guy.
They'll muddle through, and most of the rest of us will too.
Cell service is far from universal in rural areas; there has to be some mechanism already in place to allow for tractor use without an internet connection.
It would certainly reduce the general technology level by one or two steps, but the technology to build tractors has existed for quite a long time now, such that individual farms have the necessary technical capacity to repair their own equipment, and certainly regional hubs (which could be towns in the mid to low 1,000s population) could have the necessary resources and capabilities to produce new tractors and such. John Deere has major manufacturing in Waterloo Iowa, population ~67k. I'm not sure that Des Moines (215k) would be a nuclear target, and probably nothing else in Iowa either. Large cities aren't the center of manufacturing that they once were, such that tractors, oil/gas, and other farming implements are not really made in those high-target zones. Financial institutions will be very badly hit, which would cause a lot of organizational problems with how to recover.
The bigger issue would be political stability. If the post-nuclear population is breaking down into Mad Max-style roving bands, then forget about a population sustaining farming. If the people maintain communities and get to rebuilding, then it will not be a disaster in terms of humanity surviving, even though billions may die.
Putting very rough numbers on my interpretation of what you've said. A full scale nuclear war would have killed maybe 50% of the world's population in 1980, but only maybe 20% of the world's population today. These numbers are obviously very uncertain, but do you think they're wildly off?
It sounds as though one of the best ways to limit the damage of a nuclear war is to have farmers store several years worth of fertilizer on their farms. This is also something that doesn't look very provocative to other nuclear powers. Do you know if anyone has thought about this strategy?
The numbers are I think right-ish. And the concept of "prepping" key industries including agriculture is definitely valid and something an enlightened society that shares a planet with Vladimir Putin should consider. Though as Mr. Doolittle notes, huge piles of fertilizer are problematic (for several reasons, but explodiness will do for a start).
Fertilizer is explosive, so that's probably not a good idea. The small chance of that mattering in a nuclear disaster seems like a poor reason to create a situation where multiple farms have major explosions every year.
There are a lot of moving parts other than the total megatonnage or number of warheads, and stockpiles would have shrunk somewhat even without the various arms limitation treaties.
Targets in particular are easy to change in response to strategic, political or doctrinal realities. Beyond countervalue vs counterforce targeting, there is the decision about whether the marginal warhead gets dropped on an area that has already been wiped off the map.
Is this true? I know a large number of EA supporters are also AI researchers, but it's unclear that EA itself has any impact. The only argument I can see is that maybe OpenAI not releasing GPT-2's weights was inspired by AI safety ideology, but it's unclear that that action itself was hugely influential. Anyone know what this tweet could be referring to specifically?
Not just GPT-2. DALL-E is being held much more closely as well. If the impact is a shift in cultural attitudes that could be much stronger than legal measures. Like how the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" campaign worked.
Sure, but again I don't actually think keeping your stuff closed source counts as "hugely influential." The open source replications lag by a year or two, but research progress-wise it's not clear that it has any impact (since the other orgs can train their own huge LM's/image models etc., and would even if the models were released).
I agree that it's not going to stop anything, but it's sand in the gears. If some of the biggest, most advanced teams stop talking to one another you lose the multiplicative effects cooperation brings. It's not just "they'll catch up to the closed teams". It's that the closed teams would themselves benefit from making this into an open conversation and would be expected to accelerate progress all around.
But everyone publishes their methods still, so the barrier to reproduction isn't knowledge but just GPU/engineer hours. I think the EA->OpenAI's behavior connection is tenuous (not releasing their models is coincidentally also good for profit), and the assertion that it has strongly impacted research progress is untrue.
I'll take your word for it, since this isn't my field. I'm just arguing that a cultural shift can have as strong an impact on a field as a legislative one. It sounds like you're not convinced there has been a meaningful cultural shift. Or at least that any shift hasn't impacted behavior so much as established financial/strategic incentives.
You're definitely right that that's a possibility. If the tweet is correct, that's why it's so. The reason I was surprised was due to the fact that it's my area of research, and any influence on the researchers I follow/read isn't clear to me.
It's crazy to me how the lab-leak theory has not permeated 'normie' circles. No one knows who Peter Daszek is, that Fauci has been in office for almost 40 years, or that the lead bioethicist of the NIH is his wife.
As a self sanity test: In a more sane world these people are on trial/investigation, no?
Most people I know (all significantly more normie than me) are aware of the idea that it came from a lab. They vary dramatically in how probable they think it is (which is mostly correlated with what news content they consume most.) The ones who stay abreast of news via their facebook feed seem particularly pro-lab-leak-theory.
It seems to me that on net the evidence is against the lab leak. I used to be fairly pro lab-leak (after all, what are the odds that there's a lab working on bat coronaviruses in the same city as an outbreak?) but I've updated based on a few things:
* Some of the evidence that leaned pro leak at first (eg. that the animals the Chinese tested at the wetmarket were all COVID negative) ended up being fabricated (they first removed all exotic animals from the wet market, denied they were ever there, and then tested some standard livestock that wouldn't have it anyhow.)
* Bats with a closer ancestor of COVID than had been previously known (publically at least!) have been found within a couple hundred miles of Hunan
* There's a fairly strong epidemiological case against the lab leak (and pro-wet-market) based on the locations of the first known cases and clusters. There really doesn't seem to be an early cluster in the lab part of the city.
* We have actual positive COVID samples from the environment of the wetmarket where the exotic animals were kept.
All the sordid who's-kissing-whose-butt-in-washington doesn't weigh in much for me, because it's just as strong of evidence for 'our government is quietly corrupt and our elites are all rather good pals' (which is a much simpler explanation that any specific conspiracy theory.)
All told, I give the lab leak 10-15% chance of being true. It's not impossible or even implausible... but it doesn't have the preponderance of the evidence.
Re the first cluster of cases: Did you know there are (were) two labs in Wuhan, there is (was?) some smaller lab that was located very close to the wet market, right along the river were the first cluster of cases occurred. I was reading a lot about the lab leak idea in the spring/summer of 2020... but I've mostly stopped, because 'what's the point?'
Well there is not much more than circumstantial evidence. The narrative seems to be for a natural origin. Otherwise it somehow says that 'science' did something bad. And we can't have that because 'science is good'. (I've given up hope that we will ever learn the truth about the origin... well maybe in 20 years or so.)
Well there is not much more than circumstantial evidence. The narrative seems to be for a natural origin. Otherwise it somehow says that 'science' did something bad. And we can't have that because 'science is good'. (I've given up hope that we will ever learn the truth about the origin... well maybe in 20 years or so.)
Oh dear I was afraid you'd ask that. I went searching on google with a time limit of 3/2020 and 11/ 2020. I got some hits but a lot of the more wacko conspiracy stuff about china making a weaponized virus, I'll see if I can find anything sane. (There were links on an old usenet group.. maybe I can find that... hang on
(Note this is from about 4-5-2020.. that is at least when I first watched it.) Fast forward to ~ the 7 minute mark to see talk of the second wuhan lab with (perhaps) patient zero. Look not everything on this video is true... it was made early on in the pandemic.
No I have no idea where it came from. I'm just saying there is a 2nd lab that was linked with the outbreak and is near the seafood market. Maybe there was an energetic grad student working both places, IDK. I do recall when I say the nature article with the first cases, one of the maps had a blob along the river and I thought... isn't that near the 2nd lab? (And it is.)
Glad to disagree: A) Investigation - why not. Trial - if enough evidence. Can't see that in Fauci`s case. But do not care, really. - B) Was it a lab-leak? We do not have it on tape, so "Rationalists" should give probabilities. Some say 30% (just because it is Wuhan) , I thought 70-90% - as does Matt Ridley in "Viral" - but: expert Derek Lowe (on Scott's blogroll!) is near zero https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function . More relevant: economist Scott Sumners https://www.econlib.org/econlog-by-author-and-letter/?selected_letter=S#ssumner says what really matters is, such labs should never be placed in cities. But in deserts with tough isolation-regime. GoF should be banned till then. + we should better prepare. Where Covid came from, what does it really matter today or tomorrow? Horse bolted.
^ “It's crazy to me how the lab-leak theory has not permeated 'normie' circles.”
@saila,
I hope I qualify as a “normie”, FWLIW I’m not a college graduate (but my wife is) who has a blue collar job in San Francisco, and I have heard that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab.
^ “No one knows who Peter Daszek is,”
You got me, I don’t know of “Daszek”
^ “that Fauci has been in office for almost 40 years,”
Knew that
^ “or that the lead bioethicist of the NIH is his wife.”
Didn’t know, don’t know why I should care.
^ “As a self sanity test: In a more sane world these people are on trial/investigation, no?”
I’ve no idea why they should be, and you haven’t said.
^ “I welcome disagreements”
Well @saila, your cryptic “I’m angry about [thing] and [people] that other people don’t know about” message is pretty damn disagreeable and annoying, and doesn’t incline me to learn more from you, perhaps being more polite could help get whatever it is you want known to be better disseminated and make you seem less like a crank.
>I hope I qualify as a “normie”, FWLIW I’m not a college graduate (but my wife is) who has a blue collar job in San Francisco, and I have heard that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab.
I believe my definition of normie maybe be very different from others, I believe most 'normies' have never heard of 'rationalism'. Certainly they don't read ASX or SSC.
>You got me, I don’t know of “Daszek”
CEO of EcoHealthAlliance, the research company which was had grants from NIH to study sars in Wuhan. Their research would be where the leak originated. If a lab-leak occurred, Daszek would be wrapped up in it.
>Didn’t know, don’t know why I should care.
Seems like a substantial conflict of interest?
>I’ve no idea why they should be, and you haven’t said.
>Well @saila, your cryptic “I’m angry about [thing] and [people] that other people don’t know about” message is pretty damn disagreeable and annoying, and doesn’t incline me to learn more from you, perhaps being more polite could help get whatever it is you want known to be better disseminated and make you seem less like a crank.
Apologies. I only wanted to encourage informed discussion and clarify I would be willing to change my mind if presented with evidence. I thought I was more than polite, if a bit inflammatory (to encourage discussion).
100 percent agree with all of Plumber's responses.
I'll just add that literally every adult I am acquainted with, in my workplace and in the community where I live (in the U.S. Midwest), has heard of the lab-leak theory.
I personally think that when a lot of people say "Why isn't anyone talking about this?" they mean "Why isn't this the dominant narrative?" This is how the phrase is used in grievance studies and conspiracy theorist (but I repeat myself) circles, and I've rarely seen a case where the first is used without it becoming the second in any ensuring discussion.
That's probably because 'normie' is a dumb word that doesn't actually mean anything. There are plenty of non-rationalists and people who aren't permanently online that know about it, though, if that's what you're getting at.
There are two things here. There is "do people think that the official story from the Chinese government in March 2020 on how COVID originated wasn't completely accurate", and I think that quite a lot of people agree with that. However, most of them have better things to do than argue about it.
There is separately "Fauci is secretly working with the Chinese" or whatever Fauci has to do with a lab-leak in China. That's probably "you shouldn't listen to Sean Hannity 3 hours per day, it's not good for your mental health".
I think it's reasonable to question Fauci's motives, given he was one of two people in the world with the authority to allow the GoF research in Wuhan to continue throughout the moratorium of 2014-2017, and that Wuhan got that authorization.
It's reasonable to say, "sure, but he didn't give that authorization knowing that the consequences would be a global pandemic!" But then, the whole point of the moratorium was because this kind of research is exactly the sort of thing that could lead to a pandemic. That was the point of the moratorium. So if Fauci subverted that moratorium and the result was a global pandemic, whose origin story he helped suppress, I can understand people being upset about that. That doesn't require Fauci to be "secretly working with the Chinese", just that he also has an interest in not going down in history as being obviously irresponsible with catastrophic global consequences.
Oh wait, are there still people pursuing the idea that COVID itself resulted from gain of function research? I’ve seen lots of arguments about whether gain of function research should be banned, and lots of arguments about whether wild virus was accidentally released at a food market or a research lab, and lots of arguments about whether gain of function research was being downplayed, but I hadn’t heard any claims that gain of function research was actually involved in COVID itself, except for one or two breathless connect-the-dots articles in summer 2020.
Yes, people are still following that idea. Probably peak "COVID came from Gain of Function Research at WIV" was in summer of 2021, not 2020, and while the discussion has faded somewhat it hasn't gone entirely away.
Since then I haven't heard any arguments that support the natural origin hypothesis (evidence like we saw with SARS1 and MERS, but which was conspicuously absent with SARS2). The most I've seen are arguments that the Shi lab released a token few of the many viruses they've been working on for genomics comparisons and - unsurprisingly - none of those unrelated viruses had genomes that were related to SARS2.
Like I said, though, I haven't followed this closely since became a subject that people are allowed to talk about again. Please point me to anything new that tilts the balance in favor of a natural origin, or at least away from a lab origin.
Ah right, that Wade article was from summer 21 not 20, but it’s the one I was thinking of. It claims to have evidence of features not shared with natural origin virus, but as I recall, its smoking gun evidence was exactly the same character as evidence that it pointedly rejects as irrelevant. (The smoking gun is supposed to be the furin cleavage site, that is different from anything known in its branch of the coronavirus family, but he rejects the relevance of the fact that the spine is unlike anything that has ever been known to be synthesized.)
The non-natural origin has had no new support since that Wade article, while there have been several bits of evidence for or against the wet market or the lab as the site of a natural release.
It's not a slam dunk, but this thread made me much more skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis. You might disregard the genealogy data if you think the virus was engineered anyway, but the rest still seems relevant.
I think these two papers make a strong case for the wet market as an early super spreader event, but it doesn't explain how a Laotian virus got into that market in the first place. Especially if, given what other reports are saying, Laos isn't a significant supplier of animals to China/Wuhan.
Just spent some time catching up. Looks like RaTG13 is no longer the closest relative to SARS2. Instead, it's this BANAL-52 strain they found down in Laos? How did it get from Laos to Wuhan? I can't tell if this thread is just a bunch of conspiracy theory connect-the-dots, or what:
Maybe it's some elaborate hoax? It almost sounds too on-the-nose to be true:
"We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites74,75. SARSr-CoV with mismatches in proteolytic cleavage sits can be activated by exogenous trypsin or cathepsin L. Where clear mismatches occur, we will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and HAE cultures. In SARS-CoV, we will ablate several of these sites based on pseudotyped particle studies and evaluate the impact of select SARSr-CoV S changes on virus replication and pathogenesis. We will also review deep sequence data for low abundant high risk SARSr-CoV that encode functional proteolytic cleavage sites, and if so, introduce these changes into the appropriate high abundant, low risk parental strain."
P.S. Do you know who Tim Leissner is? If not, why would you expect random people to be familiar with Peter Daszek? The world is a big place, and there's no way to even keep up with notable scandals, let alone speculative rumors.
Of course, a lot of people *did* hear about the lab leak theory when it was all over the news last year. It's just that noone found any solid evidence for it and people have more important things to worry about so the story didn't go anywhere.
> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation
> But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
I'm at less than 50% on lab leak myself, but it's quite possible.
> but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses
I think there's an innocent explanation for this one: the causality is the other way round. If you want to choose a site for your new coronavirus research lab, then in a city with a large live animal market and near some impressive bat caves is a good place so you can collect a lot of samples close by.
Except that we know this isn't the reason the big Chinese virus lab is in Wuhan. It isn't near the bat caves, and it predates the wet market in question by decades. And it wasn't a *coronavirus* research, it was an every-sort-of-virus research lab.
Maybe it was set up in Wuhan because there were lots of other sorts of viruses running around there, but that still makes it a puzzling coincidence that it was so close to the epicenter of a bat-coronavirus pandemic.
To be fair, the bat caves were *not* near Wuhan. That being said, coincidences are not proof. They're maybe a reason to *start* an investigation, but if you're a year into your investigation and still have nothing beyond the original "hey there's a lab nearby, isn't that funny?" to show for it, that's a very bad look.
The whole thread started when I asked if there was any actual evidence, and the response has conspicuously been crickets.
Why? They'd try to cover things up regardless of what the truth is. They might not even know the truth themselves. Keep in mind that China *also* tried to cover up SARS 1, which is very definitely zoonotic.
Do you also think that Trump's coverup and obstruction of the Russiagate investigation was a "slam-dunk admission of guilt" as well?
Also leave room for alternate hypotheses for why they might want to destroy a bunch of evidence - like that they were doing other stuff they didn't want the international community to know about. If you're cooking meth in your house and the police knock wanting to search for a fugitive, you don't want to let them in. But that doesn't mean you're harboring the fugitive.
It was *already* investigated, last year. (Remember when *the President* asked US intelligence to look into the matter?) Unless new evidence comes out, there's no reason to worry about it.
It was a gradual process that played out over a couple months in early 2021, as the lab leak theory became more and more popular. I think there were some pieces of evidence in late 2020 that fed the fire, and a big medium post in early 2021 that helped popularize it.
Okay, its a conspiracy theory. So what? Some conspiracy theories are true. Of course it's a conspiracy theory because we're theorizing a conspiracy has taken place. Disagree with the evidence for it, but pointing out that it is literally a conspiracy theory is not some silver bullet argument against it.
China have conspired to cover up the spread of the virus from day one, spread *conspiracy theories* about the virus originating in the US and the US government covering this up, and have prevented any proper investigation of its origins from being performed (and launched multi-billion dollar trade sanctions against Australia because their leader simply called for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus). It is trivially true that a conspiracy has taken place on the part of the Chinese government, the question is how far this goes, and whether the Chinese are covering up any wrongdoing on their part (such as lab leaks) or if they're simply paranoid enough to believe that the US/WHO were going to fabricate evidence to falsely implicate them in a lab leak. It's also trivially true that Peter Daszek has been extremely dishonest and deceptive.
I don't believe in the lab leak hypothesis, but dismissing it out of hand because it is a "conspiracy theory" is unfair and the claim that there's no evidence in its favor is dishonest or uninformed.
This "no evidence" claim is exactly what the Law of No Evidence (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/law-of-no-evidence?s=r) is about. Of COURSE there's evidence, both for and against it. The existence of the lab within ten miles of the initial center of spread is weak evidence for it. So is the fact the lab was working on live infectious coronaviruses in specimens. So is the fact that the lab imported animals from far away.
It's not conclusive evidence (or even enough to make it likely, IMO), but there definitely is evidence.
None of this is racist. I'm literally suggesting Fauci and Daszak should be on trial? They are both white men afaik, if anything I'm racist against whites, no?
"Be nice to the people who see entire vast swathes of the population as congenital subhumans who at best should have inferior rights and at worst should be extirpated!"
I see this over and over, and I would take it more seriously if the people saying this recognized that racism isn't nice and (more importantly) that civility requires symmetry. If you're just civil and nice all the time to people who aren't civil or nice to you, you're just letting yourself be exploited for no real reason. As it is, it seems like little more than an attempt to abuse rationalist social norms.
"Be nice to the people who see entire vast swathes of the population as congenital subhumans who at best should have inferior rights and at worst should be extirpated!"
I don't know anyone who has this view, (I live and work in Trump country.) I was thinking of trying to steelman some of the views I do hear that you might consider 'racist'. But that gets rather involved and let me just say that I think there could be a lot of common ground between the poor whites that live around here and the poor blacks that live in urban areas. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but these two groups are kept separate and treated as antagonists, when they really could be cooperating for the benefit of both.
People around here are civil and nice, (of course there are some a-holes everywhere.) My impression is that there is less civility (to the other) in the costal elite areas of our country, I don't spend anytime in big cities, so I don't really know if this impression is right or not.
Look, I'm not the rationalism police, but I do think that if you're _not_ interested in suppressing your feelings to debate ideas on their merits rather than throwing insults at people then there might be other corners of the internet which are more suitable for that kind of thing.
In short, yes, people should suppress their feelings. Or if unable to do so, they should reach for the scroll bar rather than the reply button.
Sure you can treat people however you want. Personally if you've been treated badly by one person in some 'group' I think it's wrong to denigrate the whole group because of one person, but that is your choice.
Re: being nice on this forum.
I'm not going to look up the real words Scott wrote, but to paraphrase,
1.) Be true
2.) Be useful
3.) Be nice
Posting here you should have 2 out of 3. I think an old Herold family adage is useful here. "If you can't say something nice, it's often better to say nothing at all."
Yea, it is noticeable that the only people I'm personally acquainted with IRL who think the lab-leak theory is true are also the only people I knew who were Obama "birthers".
My impression is that it was ignored by the public, because the media treated it as a crackpot conspiracy theory. (In some part because of Daszak's behind the scenes work.) The truth doesn't depend on whether the red or blue team had the idea first. There is also a chilling effect going on in science, where scientists are (rightly) afraid to go against the main stream narrative. (It's not worth their career to say something.) I'm reading "Unsettled" now, and the same thing goes on with climate scientists.
It was treated as a crackpot conspiracy theory in early 2020 (and to be fair, many versions of it *were* crackpot conspiracy theories). Then there was a period in early 2021 where it suddenly burst into the mainstream.
I have literally no medical research background, but seems like many here do. The question is directed to people who identify as having some. Would you say it is true that there is a stagnation in obesity and obesity prevention research, or is it actually progressing about as fast as other (which? comparable how?) comparable research fields? If it is indeed stagnating, what would you identify as the chief bottleneck?
Have you been following Wegovy (semaglutide)? It's historically been used as a diabetes drug, but the FDA approved it to treat obesity last year. It costs over $1,000 per month, but it is the most effective weight loss drug ever. In clinical trials with a 1+ year follow-up, the treatment group lost 12% of their body weight compared to a placebo. It might be a gamechanger.
Whoever comes up with an effective treatment for obesity is going to be able to make an insane amount of money with it, because half the US and a lot of the rest of the world suffers from it. I think that alone is enough to guarantee that researchers will pursue obesity treatment quite energetically.
I have a strong medical research background, but mostly in a different field (been a while since I did anything in metabolic syndrome space). I'd say the issue is that the scope of the problem is massive. Look up "metabolic pathways chart" on Google and you'll find some outdated but ridiculously complex diagrams of the problem we're working to solve. It's akin to cancer in that the solution lies somewhere between "some obscure molecule/interaction buried in a mess of other pathways that we just need to identify somewhere" and "we won't solve this until we understand the intricacies of intra- and inter-cellular signaling across multiple organ systems".
That's on the biochemical pathways side of things. The 'easier' side is trying to understand what it is about modernity that has led to all this obesity and what can be done to help people overcome it (without requiring will power greater than that possessed by the patient for success).
As to the question, "Are people still looking at this hard?" Yes. Very much. The bigger the problem gets, the more resources and brainpower are attracted to the problem. People are asking all the questions, like "has the recent shift in societal usage of [obscure chemical/behavior/whatever] contributed?", that you'd think they should ask. It's always possible we're missing something, even something 'we should have thought of' long ago. But the problem is really hard, similar to many other hard problems in biology.
CF: asthma/allergy/IBD/cancer/anxiety/depression/heart disease. Cures against chronic diseases are tough. Reliable prevention measures are also tough. Sorry that it goes so slow. Personally, I'm working on an idea for cancer that I think will eventually have a huge impact, but it'll still take years before we see a big shift in outcomes. That's because even when we know what works, it still takes time in clinical trials.
Not all psychologists are as stoopit as that. I know psychologists who work with people on coping with illnesses such as cancer that nobody thinks have a psychological cause. I'm sure it is also possible to think of obesity as a metabolic disorder, and to work with people on coping with the disorder and making as many end runs as possible around the barriers it puts up to weight loss.
I myself have not looked into current research on obesity and am pretty agnostic about what is the most valid way to think about what's going on there. Though it does seem to me intuitively plausible that our brains were optimized for an environment where it is hard to get enough calories. Under those conditions, it mades sense for us to find slabs of animal fat or entire honeycombs absolutely delicious and to want to eat as much fat and sugar possible on the rare occasions when we got the chance.. So maybe obesity is the result of living in an environment where high-calorie foods are all around us, and no work at all to get.
This is part of a new series of posts I have planned on weird (potential) EA cause areas that are either completely new or that have been discussed before but are under-appreciated.
I'd like to see somebody review the book "The Shrinking of America" by Bernie Zilbergeld. Here's the best paragraph in the book. According to Arthur Janov, whose Primal Therapy created such a stir in the early 1970s, his methods produce "a tensionless, defense-free life in which one is completely his own self and experiences deep feeling and internal unity....People become themselves and stay themselves." Clients become more intelligent; are better coordinated; enjoy sex more; work better but do not overwork; lose their depressions, phobias, anxieties, as well as their compulsions to take drugs and alcohol, to overeat, and to smoke; and they are "never moody." There are special benefits for women: increased breast size for flat-chested women and the disappearance of premenstrual cramps and irregular periods. In a way, says Janov, "the post-Primal person is a new kind of human being," one who "is truly in control of his life." (Before readers rush off to sign up for Primal Therapy, I should mention that I am unaware of any independent research demonstrating the validity of these claims.)
The last time I trained an ML model I spent about a week writing and debugging it, about a day training it on a large dataset and then it spent slightly less than three and a half seconds doing productive work which produced surplus for the world (generating the answer to the classification problem I had). Therefore machine learning models are only 0.0005% efficient.
Obviously I'm being a bit facetious, but I think so is the author of this piece - you really can't measure human surplus as a function of hours spent silently working on spreadsheets at an office when so many important human breakthroughs are clearly driven by chance conversations, or pursuing side projects in 'nonproductive' hours, or just because you have been looking after your brain well enough through a combination of sleeping, eating and socialising that you make a creative breakthrough on an important project.
(To say nothing of the fact that the _purpose_ of human existence isn't obviously to do productive work forever until you die - I don't know why you assume a machine intelligent enough to compete with humans at high-level human work like cancer research would choose to do productive work forever until it obsoleted - perhaps without the need to consume shelter and food to stay alive intelligent machines might choose to ignore work entirely)
Given that the "inefficient" parts in this calculation include childhood, leisure time, and retirement, perhaps we should be looking to *minimize* human efficiency.
After skimming the article, it seems to be in comparison to a machine operating 24/7 with perfect thermodynamics. Sleeping, eating, and leisure are considered not to be "work". The author then says that only a quarter of work time is spent doing "real, useful work". On top of this, there is an offset made by people who do "counterproductive work" like journalism with bias or working at a hedge fund.
The examples the article gives are things like "A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease." and "A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand." Some later lines suggest that the work has to be progressing further as a society, in some way. Again, I'm only skimming it.
I should point out that the author's view about a quarter of work time being spent productively is just their personal observation (a.k.a. probably pulled out of thin air).
For real though, and this applies to all races in all states:
If you are left and your local Green isn't a fukin nut bar, vote for them.
If you are right and your local Libertarian isn't a fukin nut bar, vote for them.
Probably don't vote for Republicans ever, unless you lucked out and live in a state were they didn't get Primaried by some Pizzagate true believer. But they will caucause with the nutbars/invade the middleast: This time it will work I swear/Dynamite the TPP if you let them, so you do you.
Vote Democrat if you want neoliberal world order forever with no changes of significance to anything ever.
My general approach (as a bleeding-heartish libertarian) for California primaries is based on the observation that in statewide races and most district elections, anyone with an R next to his name is doomed in the general election due both to how liberal the median voter is and how toxic the Republican Party brand is in most of the state. Thus, the strategy most conducive to my ideological goals is to vote for the most fiscally conservative (or failing that, most left-libertarian) of the viable Democratic Party candidates (or a viable independent or third-party candidate, if there is one).
I haven't yet started any serious evaluation of the candidates in this particular election, but at first glance it looks like there's no serious Democratic challenger to Newsom (unsurprisingly), and the only third party candidates with any major endorsements are Luis Rodriguez (Green), who is running to Newsom's left, and Michael Shellenberger (NPP), who seems to be running on a weird mix of conservative Republican and technocratic left-libertarian rhetoric. I need to do more reading about Shellenberger, and I want to wait and see if there's signs of other candidates being potentially viable both in the primary and the general elections before I start to decide how I'm likely to vote.
Question: could consciousness have evolved as a solution to the black-box problem?
One of the challenges with AI is that we often don't know why the AI is spitting out certain results, and the lack of knowledge can cause trouble. My favourite example is Google Flu Trends. The model seemed really good at predicting the flu based on what people searched for, but it turns out it had over-fitted for spurious seasonal search terms, like "high school basketball." Its predictive capabilities therefore seemed impressive at first but then totally flunked.
Consciousness didn't necessarily evolve for anything useful (it could be a byproduct of other useful stuff). But if it did evolve for something useful, solving the black-box problem is one possibility. When brains evolved algorithms to find food or predators in sense data, perhaps they evolved the ability to attach qualia to those interpretations to better enable a top-down analysis of where those interpretations came from. It might make it easier to grasp what inputs are spurious bullshit.
My personal theory is that consciousness and "free will" evolved as a means of getting around the Buridan's Donkey problem, via the inclusion of a stochastic, semi-random element in an otherwise deterministic system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass)
Yeah, agree that acting semi-randomly is a pretty lame stand-in for what we think of as free will. Sort of like using vaseline instead of butter on your toast.
That's the sort of messy philosophical issue that people could discuss and debate until the sun explodes without ever figuring out a clear answer.
But just for the sake of argument, the Oxford Dictionary defines "free will" as "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion." If whatever neurological process results in "free will" is truly random on a quantum level, as opposed to merely pseudo-random, then it fits that definition, since it would result in truly non-deterministic behavior.
What would "acting at one's own discretion" actually entail? Even ignoring the physics of the debate and focusing purely on the conceptual level, the notion of a "true choice" that is neither caused by anything nor random seems to be inherently paradoxical. This holds true even if you believe that our actions are driven by an immaterial soul that exists outside of the body, because that soul would still either make its decisions on the basis of causal factors, or not (in which case its decisions are indeed random).
Stochastic systems can indeed be neither fully deterministic nor fully random, in the sense that they can produce multiple different outcomes from the same starting condition. But this isn't because they somehow transcend determinism and randomness alike (which, again, seems definitionally impossible to me). It's because they have elements of both, with an outcome being randomly generated from a deterministically generated selection of possible outcomes.
I thought "semi-random" from the first comment was a better word choice than "truly random". If people are driven by deterministic forces but have the ability to "override" them, I would expect that to end up looking roughly semi-random from the perspective of the deterministic universe.
You seem to be thinking of consciousness as the ability to recognize, via introspective access, how and why we came to a certain judgment. So, for instance, by your logic if Google were conscious it could have explained how it came up with its flu predictions: "Yeah, I looked for searches that had a high correlation for flu prevalence. So 'fever,' was a good one, and so was 'congestion' and so was 'high school basketball'. . ." But people, despite being conscious, will make mistakes that are similar to Google's flu prediction error, and have no introspective access to the process. For instance, they will evaluate identical resumes differently depending on whether the name on the resume is George or Susan or Latasha -- but if you ask them whether their judgment is influenced by applicant's gender or race they will tell you truthfully that they are sure it is not. They have no introspective access to their bias.
Also, I'm sure it would be possible to get an AI to "tell" you how it arrived at its "opinion" of something. Consciousness, whatever that is, would not be required. For instance, seems like the AI that treated high school basketball as a valid predictor of flu could be programmed to go through an AI version of the process human beings went through when they recognized the absurdity of having h.s. basketball in there. People didn't conclude that was a mistake via some process that AI couldn't learn to do.
Your point about bias being beyond conscious access is well made.
Let me start on your second point and then comment on the first. You point out that you would need to train an AI to go through the first AI's predictors to recognize when they are spurious. Now, imagine if you have only one AI, and you have to train it to not only find predictors for food etc., but to wrap back on itself to find BS predictors. It would need predictors for BS predictors, and maybe predictors for predictors for predictors. It seems like a tricky problem. Maybe if you could add qualia to the food predictor it becomes easier to recognize spurious ones. (Maybe.)
Now, I'm not even sure what it means to add qualia — and if I wasn't conscious myself, I don't think I'd believe it is. But since it is possible, it seems like a good way to store the attributes of things in a manner that makes their key features easier to reflect back on for quality checks.
Back to your first point. If the kind of top-down re-analysis I'm talking about is what consciousness was originally for, it would likely also be true for all conscious brains, including lizards. If true, this means it would also probably include our limbic system. So when I say "consciousness," I'm referring not only to the high level of consciousness you're using to read this, but also the basic limbic-system consciousness that we experience as gut feelings when it's passed along to our executive-level consciousness. I'm saying there's a quality-check process going on in the back of our brains that is minimally conscious, and what we experience as executive-level function is a higher level of consciousness. (All this depends on whether the limbic system does process stuff in terms of qualia, which I've heard people debate before).
All that said, when it is possible to trace a gut feeling back to its source, it's really helpful. Once I felt worried about some teenagers in a store, and realized it had to do with their skin colour, and I corrected the reaction. Perhaps one reason we have executive-level consciousness is that when we can recognize something as bullshit using the full resources of the brain, it really helps.
I've noticed a number of "rationalist" type folks taking Dominic Cummings's recent writings on nuclear deterrence very seriously; I'm thinking of these pieces...
...in which Cummings tends to claim in strong and unequivocal language that (his words) "In the Cold War America based its nuclear strategy on an intellectual framework that was false. It defined standards of ‘rationality’ then concluded the Soviets would not use nuclear weapons in many scenarios. There was a governing tautology: rational leaders would be deterred otherwise they would be irrational. Given this tautology, more vulnerability improves ‘stability’ (e.g submarine launched weapons), while better defence is ‘destabilising’ (e.g missile defence)."
I've looked into Cummings's main source for this line of thought and found it to be inaccurate in its read of Soviet Cold War strategy, so I've been sharing this in some rationalist spaces (this comment is adapted from an earlier one on Zvi Mowshowitz's blog). Consider this a warning about taking Cummings too seriously on these matters.
I don't disagree with Cummings about everything, and I certainly share his concerns about the disturbingly high overall likelihood of great power nuclear conflict, but be careful with his stuff--he is not a well-informed source on nuclear deterrence. He often says things about how the USSR was willing to push the button at the drop of a hat, and this turns out to be not at all accurate from what I can tell. He also suggests at times that constructing missile defense is a useful policy in great power nuclear standoffs; this is badly mistaken for some pretty basic reasons.
--
After Zvi M talked up Cummings's views on nukes, I became curious about the Keith Payne book “The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence” which is often cited by Cummings in support of the view that nuclear deterrence is much less stable than we think and rests on stupid assumptions about adversary psychology. So I gave the book a read and checked out some of the references.
The book makes some conceptual points that I think are useful as caveats to the usual theory of deterrence. The point is that no deterrence regime will work against every conceivable opponent. You need to take the specific goals and psychology of the opponent you face into account, rather than just assuming they are rational actors and leaving it at that. I don’t think these points count as objections to the prevailing school of thought, exactly, unless you turn it into a straw man version of itself (no, I don’t think Schelling et al believed that nuclear deterrence would’ve definitely worked against Hitler–but it is still an important point to note that sometimes a Hitler does come around). That part of the book was clarifying.
But my main goal was to clarify whether the empirical evidence Payne cites supported his contention about the disconnect between US and Soviet war plans, which he states thus (p 25-26):
“Only recently, courtesy of greater access to past Soviet decision-making practices, has it become virtually inarguable that the Soviet leadership never accepted the West’s definition of rationality with regard to nuclear weapons, and that Soviet expectations of US behavior, largely derived from the dogma of Marxist-Leninist ideology, appear to have been a significant factor in Soviet nuclear war planning.”
He refers several times to Soviet plans that “called for very heavy and very early nuclear and chemical strikes throughout Western Europe in the event of war.” (There is a grain of truth to this, but I think you’ll agree with me that it misrepresents his sources in an important way.)
The meatiest English-language source he cites is Heuser, “Warsaw pact military doctrines in the 1970s and 1980s: Findings in the East German archives,” which I hadn’t read before. It is a treasure trove, but it doesn’t say what Payne says it says. Let me quote the abstract, because the difference with Payne’s interpretation of the facts is night and day:
“Paradoxically, while the USSR was deploying more usable and survivable nuclear weapons (the SS‐20), it was developing a strategy which attempted to win a limited war in Europe with conventional weapons only. Pact records do show planning for preemptive nuclear strikes in response to observations of NATO preparations for nuclear launches. Great care was taken not to proceed to a nuclearization of the conflict unless the enemy was about to do so. These planning documents also reveal that the Pact was not expecting to launch all the nuclear weapons at its disposal.”
Essentially, Heuser’s read on the evidence is that for much of the Cold War the Soviets expected NATO to use nuclear weapons 5-6 days into a large conventional war (which was indeed NATO doctrine) and intended to use their nuclear weapons *in counterforce attacks* to destroy NATO nuclear weapons before this could be done. This was because they lacked the ability to gain early warning of NATO intent to launch. To quote Heuser again:
” Consequently, with fewer nuclear weapons at its disposal until the early 1970s than the United States had, the Soviet Union initially had to adopt a nuclear strategy of a massive, simultaneous strike of all forces available to it. Because of the limitations of Soviet abilities to monitor NATO activities, this would have had to be a preemptive strike. Only in the late 1970s did the USSR gradually acquire the technical means required for its preferred strategy, launch-on-warning: this meant Warsaw Pact nuclear release at the moment it became clear that NATO had launched or was about to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union [18].”
By the late 70s, when the Soviets had the technology and capabilities to adopt a more American-style strategy, they did so, contrary to Payne’s claims. For example:
PAYNE:
“NATO policy sought to maintain a lid on the potential for nuclear escalation via sophisticated intra-war deterrence concepts of rational wartime bargaining and limited nuclear war. These US deterrence concepts mistakenly assumed a similarly minded, “rational” opponent, and thus were wholly incompatible with Soviet war plans.”
HEUSER:
“The Warsaw Pact exercise plans, however, confirm the careful analysis of contrary evidence by Notra Trulock, who argues that the Soviet Union did plan also for limited nuclear strikes [87]. Warsaw Pact planning assumed in the late 1970s and early 1980s that there might be several nuclear exchanges, but there was obviously the hope that followon exchanges might be avoidable.”
I went into this willing to update in Payne’s direction, and I think some of his theoretical insights are sound, but I think it became clear from my fact-checking that he misrepresents the empirical evidence about Soviet planning quite badly. The truth is much more complicated than his take, and in some ways contradicts it. I certainly don’t see any evidence that the Soviets were “irrational” by Schelling’s lights. (Castro may have been that irrational, but on the other hand he may have urged a launch knowing that the Soviets wouldn’t agree… kind of like how the Poles lately keep asking NATO to do things against Russia that they know the US will veto, as a sort of brinksmanship virtue signaling.)
I conclude that Cummings is too credulous, and is willing to assert with great confidence claims from a semi-popular book without checking the references to confirm its key claims.
--
To dismiss his claims about missile defense is much more straightforward; I've been surprised to see some smart people convinced by them, which must just mean that these people haven't looked into the issue in any detail. The classic argument against missile defense is that it only incentivizes the construction of more warheads by the enemy. MIRVing (putting multiple warheads on one's offensive missiles) makes it cheap and easy to overwhelm any missile defense system by launching more warheads than the defense system has interceptors. If you build interceptors to destroy your enemy's warheads, they will simply (for much cheaper) build delivery systems for an equal number of additional warheads and you've gotten less than nowhere on the whole. I don’t see any way around this calculus unless the technology changes drastically.
The calculus is different against N Korea for the near future, since they can’t afford very many missiles and lack MIRV technology. That said, MIRV is a technology that took the US and the Soviets about 10 years to develop following their invention of intercontinental missiles. North Korea is working now to develop this technology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-17 ), so it's unlikely that missile defense will provide a feasible check against them for much more than a decade longer.
Zvi gets a lot wrong because he is a blogger like Scott who writes on a very broad range of subjects...but he has little to none of Scott's social intelligence or common sense. He also trusts twitter and uses it as his primary source which is just batshit insane lmao
He also seems to be imprudently credulous of anything that goes against "the mainstream".
It pains me whenever people go "the media is biased and sometimes makes mistakes" and conclude "therefore, I should put all my trust in people who don't even pretend to be unbiased or do fact checking".
Given Zvi's goal of providing weekly digests on the issues of the day, I'm not sure what would be a better way to go about it, but you're right that it seems to lead to more errors than e.g. Scott is prone to. And once you're reading Twitter for the news updates, it's hard not to read Twitter for the people making asses of themselves, and that filters into his posts in a way that can sometimes undermine the value of his project.
How do I choose a school for my children? My partner and I are open to public school, private school, homeschooling - but how do we evaluate our options? I'm looking for book recommendations, essay recommendations, general advice. I'm aware of Great Schools, but it seems like their metric boils down to state test scores and SAT test scores. Should I believe these metrics capture academic rigor? What's more, social and moral development are of comparable import to me - how do I evaluate a school's ability to foster - or at least not impede - those?
Don't send your children to school. It's a prison camp where the inmates are cruel to eachother, it eats up as much time as it can (both in school and outside in the form of hours of homework), very little of what is taught is retained, and it connects any academic topics with so much anxiety that people never want to think about them again. I wanted to join a sweatshop instead so that I could at least get paid, and wasn't allowed to because child labor is illegal. If you can't homeschool, at least "unschool".
Ask local experienced realtors. Particularly middle-aged females, of which there are usually plenty. They absolutely know the best schools and the best districts, and they'll tell you straight up without throwing in a load of US News participation trophy bullshit.
Just to throw in my two cents, the flexibility of the administrators can make a big difference. I went to a school that had very little resources, but the administrators were willing to let us partner with outside resources (colleges, tutors, etc) to supplement. I don’t think many schools would have done this so easily, so it’s at least something worth probing about if none of the options in your area seem amazing.
Aristocrats of the past took it into their own hands and hired tutors in their speciality to didact on that isolated topic, and often the moral lessons came from those who taught the humanities but mainly from within the family. The sociality came from the courts they frequented or lived in, which is a gonner’ today (unless we consider, rather rightly, our corporate campuses as todays ‘courts’ [yet our children are unable to frequent those in the manner in which they could with the past courts]). Living in a upper class or, if lucky [because most have pathetic communal areas when we’re thinking of the purpose of education/culturation] an upper-middle-class community which has communal areas is the best bet, I think, and, if one can afford it, homeschooling with private tutors for specialist subjects, allowing them to ‘free learn’ or ‘unschool’. Astral Codex Ten did a great article recently on aristocratic tutelage and it’s importance in procuring geniuses of the past, and how we’re lacking them these days due to the absence of this style of pedagogy.
Scott's conclusion was actually that we aren't lacking them due to the death of that style of pedagogy. We either aren't lacking them at all, or we are lacking them for some other reason, depending upon your perspective.
To answer would require more info about what you're looking for. For our bright kid, it was clear that private school X was the best in the city for academics. Turns out it's pretty good in academics for the average kid, but was unwilling to teach this kid, who could pick up the new lesson in a few minutes, more. We put him in the public school, which has reading groups, math groups, and a gifted program in elementary. That worked till he was done with elementary. Now he's spinning his wheels, but unwilling to move to, well, IDK where he could go. Maybe skip a grade.
Two other kids, it was dependent on their particular need. All 3 went to different schools. (My case may be unusual.)
For moral development, I was pleased with School A's Bible stories, which are appropriate at the K level. Less so with the Catholic school (I'm Catholic) where they emphasized "the same mass K-12 on Thu's." We already have mass birth-death on Sun's; I wanted something tailored to maturity level.
My point is, I don't think you can get effective *general* advice. It varies way too much based on your city, your wants, your capabilities (at least home school does) and the child. But I expect when you investigate your options, things will start to click.
Test score metrics are a proxy for the culture and temperament.of the students and their parents at least as much as they are.for academic rigor. Kids from backgrounds that place a premium on academic achievement and whose parents support and encourage them in their school work (or who discourage unstudiousness and academic failure) are generally going to do a lot better in objective measures of academic prowess like standardized test scores. Academic rigor is also reflected, of course. And at the individual level at least, temperament and intelligence have a huge effect.
The impact of the cultures of the students and their families in test score ratings is likely a bonus from your perspective, since that's one aspect of the social and moral dimensions of schooling (far from the only one, of course). Kids norm off their peers as well as taking cues from parents and teachers, so having peers from families that encourage taking schooling seriously is likely to be beneficial to a goal of encouraging your own kids to do so.
In addition, it seems likely (and seems to be supported by comparing my own experience at high-rated public schools with anecdotal accounts from my friends of their experiences at high, medium, and low-rated public schools, and also from anecdotes from a couple of friends who have worked as teachers) that the quality of instruction tends to get limited by the degree to which most of the students pay attention in class, do assigned work and reading, etc. Both because teachers need to slow down and focus on the basics (and spend time and effort controlling the classroom and dealing with disruptive students rather than on teaching material), and because most teachers prefer teaching more studious students so schools with a more culturally studious student body tend to have an easier time hiring and retaining good teachers.
> Kids norm off their peers as well as taking cues from parents and teachers, so having peers from families that encourage taking schooling seriously is likely to be beneficial to a goal of encouraging your own kids to do so
Though there's also a pathological version of this where your kids go to school surrounded by a bunch of cram school kids, kids whose parents force them to spend forty hours a week in cram schools outside real school, working hard to master test-taking strategies so that they can get those extra few points on every exam to get ahead of all the other cram school kids.
That's not what I want for my kids. I want them to be surrounded by kids who are smart and motivated, but interested in learning for its own sake, not solely for the purpose of maximising test scores to get selected for things.
That's true, but I'm not sure how widespread a problem that is. I went to top-rated (by test scores) public schools in a variety of locales (my parents moved around a lot when I was in high school) and never felt like I was surrounded by cram school kids. In particular, I remember myself and most of my friends being somewhere between "smart but lazy" and diligent but not insanely so. Although my own experience is almost a quarter century ago, so things may have changed in the meantime.
So with homeschooling, a lot of your experience will have to do with the support you are able to get. You should go try to find the groups in your area that do that, and see what they are like/what they offer, etc.
In most areas this is a lot easier if you are Christian than otherwise, but it's not like there aren't secular groups. But definitely see what's going on at them first, because especially if you are atheist/agnostic those are a big part of the social world your kid will end up seeing.
I'm a maths and physics tutor looking for some more students. I can teach to anyone below undergrad level, and for undergrad stuff I can teach: mechanics, QM, ODE/PDEs, chaos theory, stat mech, probability theory, logic, QFT, quantum computing basics, ML, RL and some deep learning stuff. Message me if you want my services, my rates are negotiable.
Hi all! I'm a Master's student and for my dissertation I'm doing a qualitative study on expert forecasters. If you're reading this, interested participating, and are in the top percentile on either Metaculus or GJO, or a Superforecaster, could you leave a comment or contact me via the mail connected to this account or through Twitter @meraxion? Thanks! If you want more information, read on;
The particular interview methodology I'll be using is called Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA), which is a mostly structured series of (3) interview techniques used to figure out how experts in a field view their task, and what cues and strategies they look out for that they think novices won't know about. The methodology is often used as a first step for further construction of training manuals and things like that. The 3 techniques are; the Task Diagram, the Knowledge Audit, and the Simulation Interview. The Task Diagram asks the expert to lay out the (up to six) high-level steps of their task. The Knowledge Audit digs into the cues and strategies experts use for understanding aspects of their task (and making decisions in task situations). The Simulation Interview looks at the expert's actions in situ while doing the task, asking questions about actions, situation assessment, critical cues, and potential errors, at each step (as identified in the Task Diagram).
The product of the is the Task Diagram, and a Cognitive Demands Table outlining what came up during the interview(s) as the important/difficult/demanding parts of the task.
Interviews would be conducted in a month's time (June, maybe late May).
If you think this doesn't sound too daft, please don't hesitate to contact me using one of the methods I linked to above, and/or sharing with others whom you think might be interested!
Can anyone recommend a (free, online) introduction to statistical methods in climatology.(especially statistical methods in paleoclimatology) which doesn't assume domain knowledge, but also doesn't sacrifice mathematical rigour? What is the CS229 of climatology?
how do you manage the acid base balance in your body? What supplements do you take? How do you increase that HCO3 in your blood (i don’t intend to produce an alkalosis)? I am certain that taking Magnesiumcitrate is not enough (as it is converted to bicarbonate in the kidneys, but it doesn’t mean that it necessarily increases serum HCO3). What else do you do to manage it? don’t call it “bogus science” because clearly it’s not. Drop some knowledge here, please.
Also, you might be interested in the Wim Hof method, which gets some extraordinary results by, among other techniques, breathwork that stresses said buffer in both directions. Wim Hof himself says the pH adjustment is part of why it works, I say he's full of shit but he gets results so whatever.
I am aware of that. Let’s say you eat salad with lots of apple cider vinegar, which contains acetic acid and do some exercise afterwards which leads to increased serum lactic acid. The body does compensate for it but only slowly. Taking magnesiumcitrate helps a little but I am pretty sure that one can do even more than that.
Generally speaking a slight increase in lactic acid for a short period of time is not going to affect homeostasis to a significant degree- otherwise there would be serious problems whenever you exercised too much. Is there some reaction in particular you worry about not proceeding correctly at too low of a pH, or what?
Is there a problem with the body's timescale for removing lactic acid? I don't understand why you would need to speed up that process. Could you exain, or perhaps point me towards a resource that's not just pseudoscience?
I literally *cannot imagine* enduring that kind of sleep deprivation. I feel utterly awful and am largely incapable of any productive work the next day if I get less than around 7 hours of sleep. And I find it basically impossible to nap during the day, no matter how exhausted I am.
Are there any parents here who had a similar lack of previous ability to cope with sleep deprivation? Are there any good studies about what parents can do to get their children to sleep through the night as soon as possible?
(I've read claims that bed-sharing helps--it just seems implausible to me that mothers in traditional high-fertility societies were enduring modern levels of new-parent sleep deprivation throughout their reproductive years.)
One possibly overlooked aspect from my experience: with my first I was shocked at how hard the sleep deprivation hit me. I was hallucinating. Then, my second was a worse sleeper and I was tired but fine. I found this puzzling until I remembered that I’d experience much more blood loss during the delivery. I highly recommend being checked for iron deficient anemia after birth!
There was only a 3 or 4 week period when it was really bad. Maybe even less (its hard to remember from the lack of sleep!).
For a while the recommendation is to have the baby eat every 3 hours so you will wake up the baby at night to feed. This is really why there is so little sleep. Yes the baby will wake up and cry but there are only two reasons: diaper or food. If you keep a constant feeding schedule you are much less likely to get unexpected night wake ups. One night my wife and I slept through our alarms and the baby sleep for 5 hours straight when he was maybe 2 weeks old. We thought this was horrible but the doctor said it was fine and to just let him sleep for as long as he would after we fed him around 10 or 11pm. He would then sleep for like 4 or 5 hours before waking to be fed. This helped with sleep a lot as we were sleeping a couple hours before 10/11pm.
>I find it basically impossible to nap during the day, no matter how exhausted I am.
That will change. I was not a napper either and am not any more. But during the first month I would find time to nap. Usually after the first feed in the morning around 5 or 6am. When my inlaws came to visit I napped a lot more. Almost as if my body knew someone else was here to take over (my wife wasn't as thrilled).
>Are there any good studies about what parents can do to get their children to sleep through the night as soon as possible?
We purchased the program Taking Cara Babies https://takingcarababies.com. Best $79 we ever spent. Our son was sleeping about 8 hours or more a night by 3 months and was at 10 or more by 6. Before 3 months we got consistent 6 hour periods before needing to feed and then we would sleep another 2 or 3 hours. There are many books or courses you can buy. They probably all work. The key is that you have a plan to follow which makes things a lot better.
The biggest take away from the Taking Cara Babies course is to use a swaddle and, when they are under 5 months, not go more than 3 hours without a nap and feeding (we have basically be running our lives in 3 hour chunks for the past year). Many friends who have had issues with sleep also had no napping or feeding schedule and often the baby wouldn't sleep because they were hungry or over tired (Cara speculates that colic is just the baby being overtired).
Definitely no to cosleeping. No only does it increase the risk of suffocation, I just can't imagine how having another person in my bed would make me or them sleep better. We had the crib in our room of the first couple months but stopped after it because clear the baby didnt care either way.
Finally, I'll just say that any exhaustion you experience will always be outweighed by the joy of having the baby. I was not a big baby person before having a kid and probably could have lived a very happy life without having one, but now I just can't imagine life being complete without a child.
That is very good advice. Putting it off until you achieve some theoretical level of financial security is a waste of time. As long as you have a roof over your head, a steady job and a reliable spouse then that is all you need.
Everyone is telling you their experience was better than 5 hours a night - just to provide the opposite anecdata, mine was much worse - it got to the point where my wife and I mostly didn't sleep in the same bed so that one of us on 'baby duty' could co-sleep (which improved things slightly) and get perhaps four or five hours and one of us on 'night off' could sleep properly.
Everyone telling you that your body is remarkably adaptable is entirely right however - after a 3 or 4 month period of adjustment I found very difficult mentally and physically, I basically stopped noticing it.
If you can afford it, you can hire people to take care of newborns overnight for you ("post-partum doulas", "night nurses", or even grandparents if you're lucky). If you're breastfeeding then of course you will be roused somewhat, but you'll still sleep quite a lot more. It's not cheap, but for upper middle class people I think it's some of the best money you can spend. The more expensive versions of the service include sleep training your newborn (once they're old enough) and also include light chores as time allows.
+1 to all the other advice about sleep training as early as appropriate.
Experiences vary a lot, there's a wide range of both how difficult babies are and how well suited parents are to handling that kind of stress. I do think that sleep deprivation is worse than most people realize (even as they're experiencing it), and I also think after a couple years a lot of parents start to forget how tough the newborn phase was.
Also the Snoo is a fancy bassinet that also restraints/soothes the baby and for some babies works wonders. It costs about $1000 new but there's a big resale market too.
My sample size is two and I seriously doubt an _average_ as low as 5 hours per night. Some nights, yes. But then other nights the baby will sleep like, well, a baby.
With my second child my wife proposed what in hindsight I realize was a rationalist agreement. Since she is a lifelong morning person who finds middle-of-the-night stuff to be really disruptive and taxing, while I am generally the reverse, we agreed that middle-of-the-night baby wrangling would be on me while she would deal with early mornings.
Importantly we made this agreement in advance without knowing which way the kiddo would generally fall on that continuum.
In practical application the cutoff between the two categories turns out be roughly 5 AM, for no particular reason other than it seemed reasonable to each of us.
That worked out well all the way through toddlerhood. I couldn't even say right now which of us got the lion's share of the bleary-eyed baby wrangling, but regardless the agreement held up in practice and we both think it was very helpful.
Sample size of two. If they cry during the night (and they will), don't go to them immediately. Let them cry for a while before you sort them out, slowly increase the delay and eventually they will stop doing it. Mine both slept through the night after the first month.
Also, you will be surprised how well your body can adjust to reduced sleep. You won't be tip-top, but you will still be able to function.
IMHO, the difficulties of looking after new babies are exaggerated. If it was that hard, no one would have any brothers or sisters.
Just to caution - this is effectively a description of 'sleep training', which is described in more detail downthread. The evidence is that it will definitely help improve your sleep, but it is controversial about whether you harm your baby's development / attachment by doing it.
For sure, people have been doing random things to babies for thousands of years and there's no massive risk to life of sleep training, but I assume if you're posting on ACX that you care about eg marginal IQ points which might not show up in the absence of a large and well-conducted trial.
It seems "productive work" and "caring for small children" don't really mix, from second-hand experience of my coworkers. Find an employer who's reasonably chill about things, do the bare minimum and just write off the first two years as a loss.
Sample size of one (so far!) but we got through it all right—our experience was that five hours of sleep was what we were getting during the worst of it but not at all the average of our first year with our kid.
Stuff that helped:
- Sleeping in shifts. Our daughter mostly slept pretty well for her age, with one giant exception: until she was 3+ months old she just never slept unless somebody was holding her. Our parents visited for parts of this, which helped a lot (amazing to have a third set of hands occasionally and get to sleep in with your spouse), and for the rest of it we set it up so that one of us had the baby somewhere we could amuse ourselves—I watched more TV those three months than I have since I was 14, probably—and one of us was sleeping.
We did have to scratch and claw for as much sleep as we needed at this point—like, if you see an opportunity, you go to bed and close your eyes—but it wasn't that long and I found myself much more capable of dealing with sleep deprivation than I thought I would be.
- With no other ideas, we bought this insane-looking "Baby Merlin's Magic Sleep Suit" at Target and put her in it. She looked like the Michelin Man and immediately began sleeping in her crib without issue. By the time she no longer fit in it (several months) the crib was a habit and she slept in there fine in regular clothes. In addition to recommending this specific item I would generalize this advice as "Try stuff, even if it seems kind of ridiculous." Most baby gear can be resold or traded in someplace, so it's worth a shot even if it seems kind of stupid.
- Sleep training! Holy cow I don't know how people do it without sleep training. We did the "cry it out" method. It sucks to listen to your baby cry in the other room as you start doing it, but it sucks a little less when you think about how much the baby would be crying anyway if you were in there trying to make her sleep. Again, sample size of one so far, but two years later our baby is an extremely talkative toddler who loves us and is very well-attached and does a great job of staying in her new bed at night.
I have had trouble staying productive my whole life, so the average ACX reader may vary, but I have found that having a kid basically took away zero productive time from my pre-child life—it's pretty much just a) made me more intentional about doing stuff that I have to do, which makes it faster, and b) cut into the fat, the parts of my day where I don't even remember what I was doing before.
I second the idea of the padded, restraining blanket bag things! Those were fantastic for swaddling two of our three kids and letting them get to sleep. I think the combination of deep pressure and supressing sensations caused by random uncontrolled body movements (which infants have a LOT of) really helped.
(Our second kid hated them, the idea of them, the look of them, and every other characteristic one might identify... so we had to do other options for him. He also hates being tucked in under a blanket at three years old, so maybe has a bit of claustrophobia? We'll see as he gets more communicative.)
Fwiw I consider sleep training to be an incredible life hack that immeasurably improves your quality of life. I liked this concise book: "The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours a Night" https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0399532919, which iirc promises "12 hours sleep by 12 weeks".
Worked for us! ymmv, n=1, but ... my understanding is that the research is pretty clear that sleep training is *effective* - it *will* enable you to sleep through the night. Obviously that's a different question than whether there are positive or negative long-term benefits to the child either way. But ... yeah I love sleep training and think it's great.
And yeah for the first few months, before you can sleep train, sleeping in shifts is great if you have the time and flexibility to pull it off.
Sleep training also worked for us. But I didn't mention it because it is controversal. But we used some form of sleep training for both of our kids and it worked for both.
Are you a man or woman? I think the sleep deprivation is worst for the woman as she is the one feeding the baby (unless you bottle feed or pump a lot). But either way the body does an amazing job of adjusting. Before kids I couldn't ever take naps. After kids I can nap quite well. And the reality is that infants sleep A LOT. But the issue is they sleep more during the day and they don't sleep for long periods of time. So the hard part is trying to be flexible while the baby adjusts to a normal human sleeping schedule.
Father of a four year old here. My standard advice to new parents on the sleep deprivation front is for the parents to sleep in shifts as much as you reasonably can. Flexible schedules at work make this a lot easier of course, as does generous parental leave for one or both parents. And of course if you're exclusively breastfeeding, that makes it harder, since you'll need to either pump or use formula for the father to be able to do feedings while the mother sleeps.
More or less what my wife and I wound up doing was that I'd go to bed early, around 8-9pm. My wife and the baby would hang out in the living room or the guest room, my wife perhaps napping as our daughter permitted. Around 3am, she'd come to the bedroom, put our daughter in the co-sleeping bassinet, and go to bed herself. Then, the first time the baby woke up fussing, I'd get up with her and take her to the living room or guest room for the rest of the night, until my wife was ready to wake up or (after my parental leave ran out) when I had to put the baby down in the co-sleeping bassinet so I could leave for work.
This way, each of us had a six hour or so block of solid uninterrupted sleep, plus opportunities to catch some additional sleep while the baby is sleeping.
Another piece of advice is to make sure you have several safe places to set down a swaddled newborn while you tend to your own needs, like cooking, using the toilet, and showering. A proper bassinet is ideal, especially if you're at risk of dozing off or will be more than a step and a reach away, but a pet bed will do in a pinch for places (like small bathrooms) where a bassinet won't fit.
Something I tell to anybody who is thinking about having a kid:
Some hospitals make you watch a video before you leave the hospital about not shaking your baby; shaking your baby, they explain, is bad. You should not do it. You will watch this video and think "I do not smoke meth. I do not need this video. This video is stupid. Let me go home and eat people food again."
And then at some point it's like 4 in the morning, you had a 12 hours shift doing pest control or some bullshit, with another one in the pipe for the next day, and the kid is SCREAMING. The little bastard is dry, has eaten, is warm, is actually laying on your chest and he's just, like, screaming is my hobby now, he thinks. This is what I am. I have found my ESSENCE. And it's like hour three or four of this, he's clearly just a bullshit person and you've never hated anyone more.
At this point you pick up the kid and realize something, and go "OOOOOHHH. That's when people shake them! I totally get it now!"
I'm not saying you will shake your kid. But I do encourage everyone to, like, recognize that the potential for babyshaking lives in all of us so they can better avoid it. And I'm using a joking tone here but I'm dead serious, there's just a lot of frustration you can feel in a sleep deprivation state that you want to be prepared for.
When this happened to me at 3am I told my wife the next morning and she looked at me like I'd cut the dogs head off. I felt very alone and ashamed. I am glad to read someone else has had the same experience. (I didnt shake the babe or cut off the dogs head)
Absolutely correct. The first time you feel that impulse can be pretty unnerving too, either then or later when you've cooled off.
Also there is a funny little book that's sort of about this, which sold a gazillion copies (every recent parent I know has seen it), and Samuel L. Jackson did the audiobook of it which is 5 minutes of your time that I cannot recommend enough:
Yep! Father of three, can confirm that this happens. It ALSO happens with some of the little freaks [1] at 2-3, when they rediscover that passion in anger rather than sorrow... it's astonishing just how infuriating getting the wrong color of juice can be. Mix that with a healthy dose of 'this is the third time this week I'm scrubbing your poop off the plaster walls in the middle of the night' and 'ah, you've suddenly gone deaf when I call you after two years of perfect hearing' and 'you... broke the timeout chair by throwing a fit in it??' and you really start to appreciate why some people beat their children.
Only it's not some people. It's you. And you're understanding how YOU could.
I got a great piece of advice from my mother in law for moments like this: it won't hurt the kid to be alone for a few minutes. If you're at the end of your rope, put them in a nice. safe. playpen, and walk outside (on a porch or around the house or whatever) for a few minutes where you can't hear them. They can scream or rage for ten minutes without you having to cope, and when you get back in you'll be ready to handle it again.
[1] I use this term with all the endearment in the world. I love the munchkins, even when they turn into little gremlins!
The best way to avoid doing something horrible is to realize you can.
On a deadly but less malicious note: I used to see, when forums existed, single men speaking with outrage at people who use mnemonic tricks to avoid leaving the baby in the (hot) car. If you aren't always fully conscious, you shouldn't be a parent, they said.
When we had our 2, my wife always put her purse at the baby's feet. I had a rule: there is never a time when the baby's in the car with the doors closed unless I'm in there with him. I don't care about proving I'm responsible. I just cared about them being OK, and the hell with my dignity.
It happens! You swear up, down and sideways you'll be careful, you'll be mindful, you'll never, ever do that thing - and then one moment when you're distracted with the tasks you have to complete and trying to plan ahead the rest of the day, you run into the store to pick up something fast and then realise afterwards "Oh God, what did I do with the baby/toddler???"
Actually, it is easier to shake a baby than is often realized. Babies calm with bouncing. Sometimes it it takes very vigorous bouncing. And, if you start crossing the line it works even better.
I have two children and I like to have about 9 hours of sleep per night to feel good. My father is like this too. You definitely learn to cope with the interrupted sleep, even if you don't like it. We co slept with the baby, or slept separately in order to manage best. Both my wife and I were working full time.
Another option to seriously consider is adopting. I haven't done it, so can't speak from personal experience, but my last partner convinced me that adopting is actually a really good alternative to having biological kids and avoids the sleep deprivation issue (if you adopt >2yrs old, say).
I’m three years into my sabbatical and <6 months before I get back into the market so could do with a little more cash. Thus I’m interested in tutelage. I’ve done pro-content-creation for three and a half years before the sabbatical (I’m 26, UK based) so can teach anyone much about the skill(s) of videography/cinematography/editing/photography. I’m also an adept meditator having achieved stage 7 shamatha (meditative quiescence, and there’s 10 stages), so could assist someone who wants to get up to speed with that.
If you’re interested I’ll send you my work (for the content), and fees I’ll do at £40ph but if you can’t afford it we can discuss a more suitable price for you.
I think such a marketing post is tolerated here, but if not let me know and I’ll take it down.
Just a question, what do you mean by sabbatical? I've only encountered that term in relation to taking a break from work (or maybe more technically, taking a break from your current work to explore other ideas). But taking 3 years off at 26 doesn't make any sense so it must have some other meaning.
Also, finally [for now], I spent, like, um, maybe 17 months of those three years pursuing [as mentioned in my comment] shamatha training, and I’ve also done lots of training relative to strength, hypertrophy, metabolic conditioning and nutrition/diet. Beyond that I’ve been studying philosophy for the most part, with some political science and economics too.
And it’s worth noting I’m a polymath autodidact, which might help you understand me more. Filmmaking and content creation is one interest of many, yet where I’ve, thus far, found my dominant market success and spent the most time in procedural knowledge execution.
Thanks for clearing it up. Definitely unusual to take a sabbatical so early in life and for so long, but contgrats on being able to do so. And certainly from a "knowledge/experience" POV, electing to take 3 years off to learn new things is much cheaper than paying a university to do the same.
The traditional sabbath is a seventh day off after six days of work. An academic sabbatical is something like a seventh semester off after six semesters of teaching. Three years off after age 23 thus suggests a career that began at age 5?
It does. Sabbatical [just like you said] in the sense of going to study other things (far out of reach of my current expertise/knowledge base, _but because knowledge is a unity,_ still impacting it). I’ll come back to market basically where I left off, but with a whole new ‘requisite variety’ which will impact my work in unimaginable ways [relative to my vantage point now {in time}].
Skimming the hivemind blogpost on Lacan, i am more and more convinced that lacan is, as someone else remarked elsewhere, a rorschach test - everybody read what it wants to read in it. Who guarantees me that the post is right and she has really truly understood what is going on?
Beside, i found the comparison with sapir-whorf telling, given how whorf himself was a master of motte and bailey statements such as "the hopi do not have time because they speak hopi"
Most people's writings do not function well as Rorschach tests. If somebody's writings do, I'm inclined to consider that a sign that a lot of their ideas lack structural integrity and are just complicated blobs.
Did some meditating on the Zvi/Hanson/etc. posts on blackmail.
Here's a question that came out of it:
Does there exist rationally-hidden information (i.e. it would be bad for the person hiding it were it to get out) that is positive-sum to disclose, that is not and *should not be even in theory* evidence of illegal behaviour?
To put it another way, does there exist an act X for which a) revealing X is bad for the X-doer, b) revealing X is overall good for society, c) X shouldn't be banned?
I think that was the logic behind "outing" prominent people, particularly politicans, as gay back in the 80s. So-and-so is an MP who voted for the anti-gay bill, but he frequents rent boys and is secretly gay himself. Revealing this to the public punishes him for his hypocrisy and helps us work towards legalisation.
There was always a subtle element of threat around it, whether intentional or not; if you're in a position of power or social inflluence and in the closet, we'll probably know because someone will tell us like that guy you had late-night sex with behind a bush on Clapham Common. So don't vote against gay interests or at the least remain neutral, and we'll leave you alone, but fight us or support the anti-gay elements and we'll spill your secrets in the public view.
I think it's reasonable enough to say that, as a general rule, blackmail is bad and should be treated as a bad thing. Are there rare exceptions where, owing to the particularities of the circumstances and situational factors, it might be justified? Maybe, but only in the same way that homicide can be considered justifiable in cases of self-defense, or theft might be considered justifiable in various emergencies. But almost everyone agrees that homicide and theft are still very bad things in general.
People like Hanson who try to argue "actually blackmail might be good sometimes" aren't being nearly as clever as they think. Even if it's kinda sorta technically correct if you squint, the "sometimes" in that sentence is doing a colossal amount of work.
I think blackmail is a slightly different issue to what the OP brings up. There are situations where it's perfectly legitimate to do either A or B, but not to condition your decision between them on C - for example, it's not OK to decide a tightly-contested hiring decision by asking one of the applicants to sleep with you.
Similarly, I think that there are plenty of situations where releasing negative information about someone is legitimate or even praiseworthy, but telling them that you'll release it if and only if they don't give you money should be punished - we're not trying to prevent the release of the information, we're trying to prevent the blackmail.
Oh, the question relates to the blackmail debate; it's a hole in an argument for blackmail to be illegal.
Nobody will bother blackmailing somebody about things that are positive for the blackmailee to have made public, so that's item 1.
It's negative-sum to incentivise people to discover and sometimes publish (to make their threats believable) things that are negative-sum to publish, so that's item 2.
And the benefit Robin describes of incentivising people to dig up other people's actually-dirty secrets can be handled by a bounty system *if* the information is evidence of a crime, which is item 3 (and allowing blackmail in addition to the bounty system would be bad because the bad person might outbid the bounty).
The easiest and most common form of this is "what a particular attractive person looks like naked". A lot of people would get a ton of utility out of, say, naked pictures of a famous actress who very much doesn't want them to exist.
Another example would be, for instance, that a particular person had a relative that misbehaved in some way unrelated to them. Or someone who maintains a friendship with a friend who is currently taking a dip into some kind of racism. There's certainly a lot of people who would want to know all these things about someone.
But I like the nude photo thing because, like, it's clearly net positive; there's going to be a ton of dudes who really enjoy those photos, and only one person who is broken up about them. And it does refocus that privacy is part of this - that we still all mostly value privacy in some pet situations.
I wouldn't consider the nude photo scenario to be a net positive at all. It's producing +0.0001 utils to all of the horny perverts who wanted to see them (who easily could've and would've just looked at pics of an equally attractive person otherwise, given the insane amount of pornography available on the internet), and -10,000 utils to the person whose picture is being leaked (who's just suffered an egregious violation of privacy and been subjected to an extraordinary amount of large-scale public embarrassment). Even if it makes literally *millions* of pervs infinitesimally happier, it still wouldn't be worth the trade off.
This is sort of related to something I got to later. First, we both agree that the horny perverts here should get near-zero consideration of their wants in the face of stealing something someone else owns in the sense one owns access to their nude body. We both agree it isn't worth the tradeoff.
What I'm trying to say is, yes, but there's several indicators here that you got to the right answer not by doing a utility judgment. These guys are horny perverts, she's suffered an egregious violation, and has an extraordinary amount of embarrassment. That's not dry utility language, that's already-decided-on-principle language. I'm guessing there could be infinity guys who liked the pictures pretty damn well and you still would think the violation was wrong.
Now say the pictures have been out for months and months, and there's a guy who wants to see them. He knows very much that she doesn't want them seen, but he also accurately notes that she won't know he's looking at them; her marginal disutility is zilch. We both (probably) disagree that he's wrong to look at them, but why?
What I'm getting at here is, this is wrong either way. But we can only pretend this is a clean utility judgement thing - that it's the utility that makes this wrong - so long as we can accurately measure a subjective thing. In this case, both you and I look at the perverts and go "Their enjoyment is subjective. But I'm going to judge it as extremely low , because they are the villian here".
In this case, that subjectivity is fine, because it's getting us the right answer. But most issues like this aren't that simple; say someone would prefer not to be doxxed, because they say it would put them in danger. Both the value of the dox (to everyone who would like to know their real name, or where they live, or whatever) and the risk to the person's safety are both things that the person judging the morality of the dox knows subjectively, not objectively.
If you have some solid anti-dox principles - i.e. you don't dox someone unless there's absolutely no other choice to preserve life, or something - then you are good here. But if you don't, if you are relying on a cold utility judgment, then you are just hoping that for the first time ever most people will be reasonable and unbiased when making subjective judgements about other people they may or may not like.
I'm not saying that my utilitarian calculation is the *only* reason I think leaking nude photos of people against their will is wrong. Simply that even from a strictly utilitarian point of view, the math doesn't add up in favor of the leakers.
Would that result change if there was some arbitrarily high number of perverts out there who'd enjoy the nude photos? For instance, if we lived in a galaxy-spanning society with quintillions of humans (and possibly other sapient beings who might, for whatever reason, gain enjoyment from seeing naked human women)? Yes, but I'd still say that leaking nude photos was wrong in that instance. It's like Yudkowsky's old thought experiment, where torturing one person for 50 years will prevent 7 trillion people from getting mildly irritating dust specks in their eyes for a fraction of a second. I'd choose the dust specks, because I don't think it's worth causing a great deal of harm to someone just to provide an infinitesimally small amount of good to a much larger group of people, even in situations where the math *does* actually work out for the larger group if you're just looking at pure utility calculations.
That doesn't necessarily mean that I reject utilitarianism, merely that my own utilitarian calculations are "bounded" so that trivially small positive values are ignored when trading off against huge negative values. (And vice-versa: I'm also inclined to ignore trivially small negative values when trading off against huge positive values, e.g. I don't think preventing the discomfort of racists who don't want their children going to school with black people is worth opposing the enormous utility that comes with desegregating schools, and still wouldn't think that even if there was a ridiculously high number of racists who were made uncomfortable by desegregation.)
Yudkowsky didn't use 7 trillion (given the description of the problem, 7 trillion would actually probably make the torture worse even for a strict utilitarian, since 50 years is 1.6 billion seconds and the dust speck is barely noticeable for a fraction of a second).
Yudkowsky used 3^^^3. Which is 3^(3^(3^(3^(...)))) where the *amount of 3s* in that tower is 7.6 trillion. The non-infinite guesses at the size of the *entire* universe (as opposed to the observable universe), while in some cases mind-bogglingly huge enough that given arbitrary point-to-point FTL humanity would run out of time before the stars went out before it ran out of space for exponential growth, are still far less than 3^^^3 (whether you measure in cubic Planck lengths, in atoms, or in cubic megaparsecs; stuff like that is irrelevant in the face of 3^^^3).
I'm not convinced the nude photos are necessarily net positive. The subject's negative preferences seem probably a lot stronger than any individual person's positive preferences; it's unclear to me how many people you'd need on the positive side to balance that out. I'd also guess there's a large number of third parties with mild negative preferences, from religious people with ethical objections to porn studios who'd rather not have the competition.
If the benefits are really so much greater than the drawbacks, why can't people work out some price point where the celebrity would *voluntarily* sell nude photos?
I mean, we have those price points, they do it pretty often. But some of them still opt not to; it's a choice they are making. Maybe it's a cold financial choice and they are just waiting on the right price, but it's arguably their choice to make.
The other part is harder, because it introduces some complexity that makes it impossible answer this kind of question in the first place:
1. We have Jane, who is famous but wants a normal monogamous sexual life she controls; someone sneaks pictures of her: she is very upset.
2. Her pictures make a bunch of people who make money off those types of pictures existing (TMZ, celebrity porn sites) lots of money and they are very happy.
3. Her pictures are instrumental in quite possibly millions of orgasms, many of them "net extra" to the world.
4. Some moral people are sort of upset about the pictures being stolen.
5. But before the pictures were stolen, a bunch of people were sort of upset that they didn't know what Jane looked like naked, and that was negative
6. Meanwhile Jane doesn't stay VERY upset forever, and she's just one person BUT
7. Jane's brand might be damaged.
8. Or it might do much better!
And so on and so forth. But for the sake of argument, imagine that every second of Jane's life would be measurably worse after the pictures were stolen. That's probably around, say, 16 million seconds. But imagine her pictures being out there were responsible for, say, 50 million orgasms. We can easily say the pleasure outweighs the pain here, if that's what we are going for. And let's imagine most people don't like Jane very much, at least in our bubble; we find it hard to have sympathy for her, because she has an annoying voice or something.
Whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible to imagine a situation where this is a net good. It's actually *really easy* to do it if you are motivated by hatred for the person - see people sympathizing with Lorenz for internet-harrassment on one hand while enthusiastically cheering a full-dox she performed on someone to punish them on the other.
But if you want like, a principled stance on this it's hard to get unless Jane has some basic right to privacy, some basic rights over herself, If she doesn't have these, then the only thing standing between here and a really, really morally justified peeping tom is how bad he wants it.
16 million seconds is about half a year. I think you misplaced a couple zeroes.
It seems implausible to me that the pics generate any significant number of net-extra orgasms. Most people who can orgasm from a picture can already orgasm as often as they choose.
You said "we have those price points, they do it pretty often". Could you clarify whether you meant "the average celebrity does it pretty often" or "it happens pretty often that at least one celebrity in the world does it"? I admit I haven't researched this, but it was my vague impression that only a tiny minority of celebrities do this--which is not incompatible with that second interpretation.
I did some stupid lookup thing on the seconds and didn't attempt to calculate it myself, that's just a foul on my part - retracted.
For celebrity nude scenes, they aren't tremendously rare; I don't know what semantic games we'd have to do to decide on what "fairly often is" but there's a substantial proportion of female celebrities who you can go, like, look up their boobs.
Yes, I know that people can masturbate without particular pictures. Presumably some of them would crank out an extra one, and some would have an especially fun one, or something. There's a reason search bars exist - people really do have preferences, etc.
But all this is besides the point. What I'm saying with all this, what I really did specify, is in there:
**Whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible to imagine a situation where this is a net good. It's actually *really easy* to do it if you are motivated by hatred for the person - see people sympathizing with Lorenz for internet-harrassment on one hand while enthusiastically cheering a full-dox she performed on someone to punish them on the other.**
Note that you sympathize with Jane - you don't think people should see her boobs if she doesn't want to. So your reflex is something like "fuck you there's no way a zillion guys could cumulatively want to see Jane's boobs more than she wants to hide them". But there's no way to quantify this well - that's why the zag to "whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible".
But in this case, a reflex hits: we go, wait, when it's someone we LIKE, things like privacy and violation end up trumping things like bare utility.
Lets throw out another scenario:
Jane is a nice girl who shares an apartment with a friend as she attends college. She is not aware that her roommate's boyfriend wants to see her naked, but if there's no question for either her, her roommate, or her roommate's boyfriend that she is opposed to this in a generic sense that encompasses him ever seeing her naked.
One day, Jane's roommate's boyfriend sneaks into the bathroom while jane is showering and takes several pictures of her, which he keeps. He shows it to noone except other people he also knows to be creeps; none of them know Jane and he doesn't tell them her name, so it never circles back. His relationship with roommate ends shortly after, and Jane never twigs on anything weird in his behavior. Several years later, he is bored of them and deletes them.
Jane has in one sense suffered no negative utility. J's R's boyfriend and his creepier friends get SOME utility out of the pictures. The utility here is "created", not "taken". And yet it would take a very rational rationalist indeed to feel OK about this. In another sense she's suffered at least some kind of loss, utility or otherwise - but we have to acknowledge that there's some value to Jane's wishes and some right to privacy to get there.
And then, say, we move to celebrities with leaked photos. It starts to be easier to say "Well, good chance she leaked these herself" and that was indeed some of the dialogue around, say, the most-recent-that-I-remember leaked picture scandal. And also celebrities seem a little less real to people - like they exist for them, to provide them with entertainment, and it's a little less of a leap to be willing to ignore this.
Now imagine if, say, nudes of someone like Majorie Taylor Greene leaked, or something. We'd expect to see much less principled resistance to leaked nudes and a lot more crowing about them than we would with an entirely sympathetic person.
This is getting super long, and I'm not trying to gish gallop. But what I'm trying to say is something like this TLDR:
1. I think it's pretty easy to make an argument that it's at least possible that a sufficiently popular leaked nude provides enough enjoyment to millions of people that it outweighs the distress of one person in cold-dry-utilitarian terms.
2. I concede that it's hard to quantify this kind of stuff; we don't have hard and fast distress-vs-sexual-enjoyment standards to draw on here.
3. It matters only a little bit, because what I'm trying to get across is that the it's much, much simpler to say "fuck that person, their right to privacy doesn't exist in the face of cold, dry, utility" when you dislike them.
I think 3. matters a lot, because utility is the easiest morality system in the world to cheat; you just assign enough utility to what you want to do to allow you to do it. And so, like, I've seen multiple places going "It was super OK to dox libsoftiktoc because there's utility in us knowing their home address and real name". And I'm pretty sure whether or not you think that's true - that it was fine to do, because utility - is pretty heavily influenced by tribal affiliations.
Sorry if this was super long; it's been a long weekend in a lot of ways and I'm pretty sure i'm not being efficient here. If it's not clear, I'm very much against leaking nude photos. But I think you have to consider at least SOME situation in which you are sympathetic to the person whose privacy is being violated so you consider the value of privacy at all.
As a general policy: If you believe your conversational ability is significantly impaired, I would much rather you reply to me next week when you're feeling better, rather than forcing a fast, low-quality response.
And yes, that was super long. And felt like you have several axes to grind, and you're more interested in grinding them than in replying to anything I said.
I think probably the most important part is that you have a model for how utilitarianism is supposed to work that seems pretty sharply divergent from mine?
My understanding of utilitarianism as a moral framework is that it's based on the assumption that each person has some "true" utility function that's not under their voluntary control; if something makes you feel unhappy at the -20 level, you can't just "assign" a utility of -200 to it instead in order to get what you want. One could argue about how closely this abstraction corresponds to any real thing, but that's how the abstraction works.
I think possibly you're confusing the moral theory of utilitarianism with rationalist *strategic* advice to maximize your personal utility, which isn't even attempting to be a moral system. (Though it's presumed that your personal utility function includes some weights for your moral preferences, if you have any.)
Yes, lots, obviously. For example, a couple I've seen (roughly - I don't remember the details) in real life.
:- "X has a recurring pattern of seducing young, vulnerable women and treating them shittily; do not get involved with them".
: - "X sells shoddy merchandise, go and shop at Y instead".
A corollary to the liberal belief that the threshold for banning things should be high is that there are lots of non-ban-worthy behaviours that are still severely immoral and that merit lesser sanctions, and warning people about them is almost always going to be part of that.
Most people would say that selling shoddy merchandise without the appropriate warnings is fraud (certainly it's literally against the law in Australia), so I don't think that clears the "the thing being revealed shouldn't be illegal" criterion.
Nixon's White House recordings that came out during the Watergate investigation contain some examples of this alongside the actual criminal or criminal-adjacent stuff.
For example, it isn't and shouldn't be illegal for a high elected official to use ethnic slurs in private conversations with advisors, but it's generally damaging to that politician if the slurs are revealed publicly, and it's good for society for voters to know that such an elected official (especially if said official is eligible for reelection, which Nixon was not) is the sort of person who uses ethnic slurs.
That sort of gossip was one of the things I thought about when considering the question originally, but it's not at all obvious to me that the consequences of this are *actually* positive in the sense of resulting in better outcomes for the population.
Representative government has a failure state where the voters don't know what the government is *doing*, but ultimately some rude language that doesn't result in anything is morally irrelevant.
How is it good to know what kind of language an elected official says in a private conversation?
We had leaked private conversations where our top politicians were calling the citizens dumb fucks, said they'll be working for a bowl of rice, called our stance in foreign politics "sucking American dick" and so on. That made me respect these people more because this is how intelligent people converse among themselves on social issues! It would be really disturbing if even in private they still kept the PR charade, and I'd consider them some particularly alien species of psychopath.
On the other hand, it was a PR disaster for them because dumb fucks don't like to hear that they are dumb fucks.
I wasn't thinking of the vulgarity or bluntness.of the language as the problematic part. In modern American culture at least, habitually using ethnic slurs is a.pretty strong signal of animus against the ethnicities in question, and it's that animus which I think it's beneficial for voters to know about.
Your perspective seems to be that the politicians are being accurate in their disparagement of their own voters. While that may certainly be true for some voters, it's clearly not true for all voters. More importantly, we don't need to take it as a given that all politicians are lying about whether they care for the interests of their own voters. In fact, looking for clues about politicians actual beliefs is one of the core metrics many voters use in deciding who to vote for. Knowing that the politician who wants your vote actually thinks of you as subhuman scum is extremely useful information! They almost certainly will not do things to further your interests, if they don't even care about you or your interests enough to refrain from thinking of you as [disparaging term] and voicing that thought out loud.
Given the set I'm averaged with, I expect the politician to consider me subhuman scum, at least in aggregate. I prefer my politicians to have a realistic worldview, and in democracy they have to appeal to the median voter. If they do it without disgust, I don't think they are paying attention.
Just about any negative information about a product. Or any other information that would cause some people to choose not to purchase that product. (Assuming the number of customers affected is larger than the number benefitting from the firm's profits.)
Trade secrets. You know a secret, more-efficient way of doing something, which lets you do it more cheaply and earn a higher profit. If everyone knew the more-efficient way of doing it, then the world would have less wasted effort and higher productivity, but you'd lose your competitive advantage.
(Note that this is basically why we have patents: they provide an incentive to reveal your useful secrets to the world.)
.
Also, the category of crime has this sort of fuzzy edge of trivial offenses that are too minor to be worth invoking the machinery of law enforcement. Like if you cheat at board games, or fail to do chores that you agreed to do. Formally declaring those to be crimes would have all sorts of practical problems.
But they're still, you know, misbehavior. You can imagine some hypothetical perfectly-efficient legal system with perfect knowledge and zero transactional costs where it WOULD make sense to consider those crimes (with extremely light punishments). It's only a bad idea because we're not efficient enough.
If the owner of a company is secretly donating money to politicians supporting anti LGBT-stuff. Or racist politicians. Or whatever politics you consider bad but don't think should be banned.
If a company that claims to be pro environmental is actually doing stuff that 'cause pollution. Or whatever way a company is hypocritical in ways that you don't think should be illegal.
I'm not so convinced that society would be better off knowing that some business owner donates to some cause I disagree with and that is unpopular. I think that that information might do more damage to a productive business and to the openness of society than to the cause in question.
I certainly don't think adultery should be a crime, but it does seem plausible that people have, in general, a right to know if their partner is cheating on them.
This is another thing I considered before writing the post (I was thinking of Clinton/Lewinsky), but I do think that adultery should be illegal. I'm a libertarian, but this is in the same sort of category as perjury or desertion; it's not at odds with liberalism to be able to enforceably bind yourself to do X (no Western nation permits forced marriages, so it really is the person binding him/herself).
I get the theoretical libertarian argument for why adultery isn't a victimless crime, and it always seemed insane to me that adultery was decriminalized (at least in the sense of nobody ever being actually prosecuted for it, whatever obsolete laws remained on the books) for decades while laws against homosexuality were still enforced.
But isn't it the case that breach of contract isn't a *crime*, as opposed to a tort for which one can be sued? I wouldn't be averse to making it permissible to sue one's spouse for breach of the marriage contract (which is basically what divorce with fault amounted to, complete with financial penalties for the at-fault spouse.) Would you want to criminalize other forms of breach of contract?
Another point:
It seems highly unfeasible for the law to criminalize infidelity to a romantic partner with whom one *doesn't* have an actual legal contract. But most people, including myself, do believe unmarried partners can have a *moral* obligation of fidelity, and therefore a moral right to know if their partner if unfaithful.
My point then still stands, if one assumes that the blackmailed unfaithful romantic partner isn't married.
I mean, breach of contract isn't a crime primarily because it doesn't need to be in order to deter it and because the level of harm induced is low enough that the usual civil penalties i.e. monetary damages are usually sufficient.
In the case of adultery, though, a nontrivial percentage of the population would want essentially Shylock's contract i.e. "on pain of death" - the traditional Christian marriage ceremony, indeed, implicitly invokes the penalty of *damnation*. And allowing Shylock's contract into civil court would be a terrible idea.
There's also the argument from certainty of paternity -> birth rate, which would make society an aggrieved party.
So while I'm personally not entirely sold on it needing to be criminal, it's not super-obvious that it should be only a tort.
Your point about unmarried couples is decent, though.
"In the case of adultery, though, a nontrivial percentage of the population would want essentially Shylock's contract i.e. "on pain of death""
I'm highly skeptical that a "nontrivial" (let's say greater than the Lizardman's Constant of 5%) percentage of the population would actually want this.
Doing a survey on this in the current West would be kind of hard given that saying you'd want an adulterous partner dead can come back to bite you (either via a cancellation mob or via murder charges if your partner dies suspiciously at some future time).
But it's easy enough to point to the very, very long history in law (and present existence in some places) of in-flagrante-delicto adultery being a defence to murder charges and/or of adultery being a capital crime.
As an aside, are you and the other LadyJane the same person?
Same for other similar anti-social behavior. Lying is bad, I don't want it to be illegal for obvious reasons, and also if someone lies about something presumably it would be harmful for them if that came to light.
Wait, why should lying (intentionally claiming falsehoods to be true) not be illegal? I know that laws against lying are prone to being co-opted by authoritarians, but that invariably involves prosecuting people who were not actually lying.
To me the set of things which government should prohibit is smaller than the set of things which are morally wrong. As an example, I don't think the government should be intervening to arbitrate truth (in most circumstances).
Congratulations to Hidden Open Aphorism contest winners timujin, Elisabeth Piper and Gašo, and thanks for all the pithy aphorisms and thoughtful comments!
الكلاب تنبح والقافلة تسير" (The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on) so I'm proud to announce the inaugural ACX Open Political Punsters contest, in tribute to the great comedian Volodimir Zelenskyy.
Prizes (well kudos) for the punniest political puns, with extra points for originality and brevity.
Your starter for 10:
- Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea? Because all proper tea is theft! (makes me so Proudhon)
Contest closes 8pm UTC Monday 4 May the force be with you and your time starts... now!
Yeah any interpretation that relies on the concept of "non-quantum observer" is going to run into the problem of defining this concept...
Not an expert at all, but I think I can give three coherent points of view:
- GRW stochastic collapse: a "non-quantum observer" is any system that is big enough so that one of its quantum components will collapse its wavefunction (very rare, random event for a single particle, but inevitable for big systems). The cat is macroscopic so it is a NQO.
- De Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory: no concept of NQO, no superposition. One thing happens, either the cat is killed or not, depending on some hidden variables of the quantum system.
- Everettian Many Worlds: no concept of NQO; the atom is in a superposition of (decayed + not decayed), the vial is (broken + not broken), the cat is (dead + alive), and anyone who opens the box will be (seeing the dead cat + seeing the live cat)
The Schrödinger's cat experiment is designed to point out the absurdities in quantum mechanics. The cat is a non-quantum observer from its own perspective, but not from the perspective of the researcher, which leads to logical inconsistencies. You can take it a step further by adding another researcher outside the room, for whom the first researcher is also in a quantum superposition of both sad the cat is dead and happy the cat is alive.
Yes- it's called AI futurism (and most forms of Singularity-related futurism, frankly). Doctrow had his tongue in his cheek when he titled one of his novels "Rapture of the Nerds", but he was closer than he'd admit when he described the Singularity that way.
When you tally up the ratings of the book review entries, it would be interesting to sort reviews not just by average rating, but also by variance. (Will we get to see average ratings for all or any of the reviews?)
seconded! 'divisiveness' seems to me a better an indicator of substance than mere rating, more so divisiveness in the eyes of this blog's readership.
especially given scott's reviews provide such a strong stylistic template to lean into, sorting by divisiveness might favor originality/experimentation/insight over those that ape his style to come off superficially as a "good" review
Any mental health/psych types want to have a go at this one?
My wife: early 30s, hyper-conscientious, neurotic with history of intrusive thoughts. She's currently struggling with thinking back to a professional document she wrote and getting waves of anxiety about whether the information was absolutely correct and defensible in court (NB it is very unlikely to end up in court, and her job is not in law - the memo just had some legal implications). In general, her relentless searching for possible sources of fault and guilt, despite (or because of?) her life being very comfortable, makes her life hell.
She's considering which type of professional to talk to, and whether or not she should be regarding anti-anxiety meds as a last resort (due to side-effects etc.). She's seen a psychoanalyst once (ages ago) and was frustrated by their esoteric/lofty/impractical approach.
Any suggestions appreciated as to what type of professional to talk to and whether anti-anxiety meds are a slippery slope to another kind of hell.
If you are not able to find a professional to talk to that your wife accepts consider the book "Feeling Good" by Burns. It is a classic CBT workbook that many professional therapists will use when you see them. Self direct CBT has been shown to work basically as well as CBT received from a therapist. I have had both professional CBT and used the book. They both work if you stick with the practice.
+1 on the shrooms, they might help and shouldn't make it worse.
Don't trust anyone who'll suggest chronic use of benzos, regardless of credentials. That shit ruins lives and some psychiatrists give them out like candy.
+2 on shrooms. If doing it alone, as long as their is an intention set before that is around the lines of “I want to discover the root of why X is occurring and heal it” with the courage to explore any memories and narratives based off those memories, and having a guide, like you Sir [producing the comment] to help her reformat or re-jig the narrative.
In general I am pro-shrooms. But she's never done drugs and the thought of having a bad/weird trip is a potential source of anxiety. This may not make sense to seasoned trippers but it's not straightforward to simply suggest hallucinogens to everyone, especially anxious neurotics.
I could be a pretty good could guide for her, but the last time I did shrooms it was an "alright, that's it, I'm done" kinda trip.
Doing it in a therapeutic setting with trained professionals would definitely be the way to go. Oregon has legalized it, but I’m not sure what the current status is. I’m not sure the extent to which facilities are up and running.
What you're describing sounds like classic OCD of the kind called scrupulosity: hugely disproportionate worry and guilt about possible minor mistakes or rule violations. Some people's scrupulosity focuses on violation of religious tenets, but secular versions like your wife's are also common. I'm not sure what you mean by intrusive thoughts. If what you mean is that she thinks all the time about things like whether professional documents had mistakes in them, that's not intrusive thought OCD -- that's just a manifestation of the scrupulosity. People who suffer from intrusive thought OCD have thoughts they find repulsive or disturbing. They get into a cycle of trying and failing to push them out of their mind. The more they try not to think about them, the more they think about them (it's like "don't think of an elephant -- no, no, stop, do NOT think about that elephant!")
Anti-anxiety meds are definitely a slippery slope into another hell. So is drinking alcohol to quell anxiety. The meds that are most effective for OCD are antidepressants. However, antidepressants have substantial downsides (weight gain, sexual dysfunction). OCD responds well to a form of CBT called exposure and response prevention. I recommend that you go to iocdf.org, where you can find good general information about ocd, and also search for professionals by zip code. The professionals listing there mostly have specialty training in OCD treatments -- they're not just generalists who say they treat everything, including OCD.
Thanks - I wasn't aware that 'scrupulosity' was a thing but that's exactly it. By intrusive thoughts I mean, yes, the gross/repulsive ones - she used to have these but now it's kinda morphed into just being about guilt and error. Point taken re: OCD professionals.
Thankfully she doesn't do drugs or alcohol; and her baseline opposition to 'medication for the sake of medication' is fairly strong.
The fact that she has had 2 quite different problems, gross thoughts & scrupulosity, that sound like classic forms of OCD strongly suggests that what she's presently suffering with really is OCD, rather than something more neurotic like excessive need to get praise for her work. Highly recommend iocdf.org.
The problem with the rationalist community is they refuse to see the underlying reality because it can’t be easily measured with their tools. There has not been some sort of great shift in the chemistry of the human brain that requires all these pharmaceuticals to set it right. This is not a material problem requiring a material solution.
Rather, we are living through a collective spiritual crisis. This case is but one of many manifestations. For more manifestations, walk around any urban center, both on the streets and in the office buildings. We don’t need more of the reductive scientific materialist “solutions” that this paradigm caused. We need spiritual transformation.
I cured myself of addiction, depression, anxiety, etc., etc., through years of committed spiritual learning and practice. It was hard, but it’s the only way out. Everything else is just suppression and numbing of the spiritual despair at the root of modern man’s soul. Or what’s left of it, anyway.
I'll bite. What does spiritual learning and practice mean for you, on a day-to-day basis? Are you within any particular tradition?
I agree with your point but there is a lot of worth in stopgap solutions when you can't address things at the root, and that's what the OP is searching for.
I practice in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. It involves study, meditation, regular retreats, chanting at the temple, etc. Though really I consider myself an adherent to the Perennial Philosophy. Ultimately the form of the tradition is less important than being connected to one. Psychedelics also provided me with paradigm shifting experiences that set me on my journey.
I also believe a key to healing is recognizing the existence of spiritual realms and a spiritual order to the universe (like kamma and rebirth). If you’re stuck in the scientific materialist paradigm, I don’t believe true healing occur. It’s a dead end.
I'm not that far from you in certain terms(also Buddhist), but I see it entirely differently: assigning any intrinsic 'spirit' to the world is a mistake - however we experience reality in an emotional sense is in a way a choice you make yourself on some level, just like any question of perception is a property you assign to your model and thus one that you can override. Otherwise you're just habituating yourself to learned emotional helplessness and making your internal state dependent on that which you might not ever have control over.
That is, one can choose to see reality in rationalist terms and just discard any despair, angst or alienation as unproductive aberrations of insufficient focus and concentrate your attention on what you can physically change for the better for yourself and for others. Psychedelics only reaffirmed that for me.
I see. It's not entirely fair to label that as purely spiritual, given that the core practice is about increasingly skilled induction of altered states of consciousness - something that can help with mental disorders for pretty obvious reasons, and also takes years to get good at, regardless of your philosophy.
Scientific materialism is a dead end but the human mind seems capable of functioning regardless of surface-level beliefs - I've met plenty of "spiritual" people very troubled by issues they shouldn't be, and plenty of "materialist" people who gave no fucks and had very healthy outlooks.
I agree spirituality is kind of... self evident on psychedelics, and overall more adaptive in daily life.
Fair enough. Having been raised by psychologists, put in counseling and on SSRIs at the age of 8, lived in a household where everyone was on psych meds, and then transcended that whole paradigm with vastly superior results after an arduous spiritual journey, I am admittedly hardened in my belief that the modern mainstream approach to mental illness is bullshit. I also think it robs people of their human potential. But of course everyone needs to find their own path. I’m just presenting another possibility and another paradigm. Yes, I’m pretty sure I’m right. But I expect anyone reading these comments to weigh the possibilities themselves. I’m certainly not forcing my paradigm on anyone. But here it is. Make of it what you will.
Agree with you that SSRIs are way way overused. Giving them to kids seems crazy to me, except maybe in truly dire situations where everything else plausible has been tried first. Seems like a lot of docs see most problems as Prozac Deficiency Disorder.
Your description is extremely similar (almost identical in every way) to something a close family member went through. In summary, it was diagnosed as anxiety, and Sertraline has effectively controlled it with no obvious side effects for nearly a decade. The path to current state (all is well) was difficult and could have gone very badly. Would be happy to go into more detail privately - lots of things I wish I'd known 10 years ago - if you like; you can email 0pedunculate at Gmail dot com.
(I am not a mental health professional, and I recommend your wife seek out professional diagnosis and help).
> She's considering which type of professional to talk to
Your description sounds very much like an anxiety disorder (eg OCD or GAD). I would recommend seeking a professional who has experience treating anxiety disorders with CBT.
> She's seen a psychoanalyst once (ages ago) and was frustrated by their esoteric/lofty/impractical approach.
All the more reason to seek out a therapist who practices CBT (such as exposure and response prevention), rather than a psychoanalyst. These are completely different things.
Regarding medications, I agree with what dualmindblade writes about SSRIs versus Benzodiazepines. They are completely different.
Another commenter has mentioned "primarily obsessional OCD." The consensus is that the cases sometimes called "primarily obsessional OCD" are really just "OCD in which the compulsions are mental acts rather than physical acts." What you describe as "relentless searching for possible sources of fault and guilt" sounds to me like "mental compulsions." Reassurance-seeking is another common compulsive behaviour in these cases.
I have been keeping up with the research on psilocybin for depression and other psychiatric disorders, and agree that it sounds promising. However, the studies that had impressive results gave subjects a couple of psilocybin trips, with professionals present, embedded in a series of 10 or so counseling sessions where subjects discussed the problem they had come for treatment for, prepared for their trips, then processed them. That's really different from just eating some shrooms. Also, I have not seen any studies of psilocybin for OCD. Have you?
Are you familiar with Griffiths and his research? Nothing glib at all about this response. I'm simply presenting another option with pretty good evidence behind it. If I were the original poster, I would take a look at this body of research and see if it might be something worth pursuing. Rather than dogmatically rejecting it offhand due to social stigma...
Really depends on what meds you're talking about. SSRIs have their issues but they don't usually cause anything like hell, withdrawal can be hell for some but thankfully it's 100% avoidable with a long, slow taper, much slower and more gradual than the one your doctor will prescribe. They aren't psychologically addictive so risk is near 0 as long as you're willing to do the long slow taper if it becomes necessary. Benzos are a bigger risk. Most have no problem at all, but a minority find them irresistible, and they will strike down people you might not expect, say Jordan Peterson. Withdrawal can literally kill you and is said to be worse than heroin by many addicts who've experienced both. The long (like a year or more) slow taper still works but only if the person can be on board and resist temptation the whole time. Then there's a bunch of stuff in between. Doctors of course have some sense of this but they are biased, so keep that in mind, do your research and you'll be fine. Oh and psychiatrist, she should see one of those. They usually good about working around the patients concerns, if not just get another
Not a doctor... but was volunteering in mental health support. Seems like starting with a therapist would make sense. She might get referred to a psychiatrist for a potential OCD/Pure O (don't take my idle words as a potential diagnosis). It is also not bad to figure out if she had a childhood trauma (of which an out-of-proportion feeling of guilt can be a sign), which would require a trauma-aware counselor, preferably of non-Freudian persuasion.
Anti-anxiety meds are hit and miss, and often mask the real issues instead of addressing them, and side effects can be rather brutal and occasionally long-term, withdrawal is a bitch, but sometimes there is no other choice, so...
Jaynes has convinced me that almost all hypothesis testing, as it is currently performed, is ill-founded.
He also clarified something that I've been coming to for a while: the goal of statistics is *always* prediction, and if your model can't predict anything, it's worthless. This has been my problem with string theory/SUSY, and it's come to the fore of my mind again because of the Lacan discussion. Who cares what your psychoanalysis theory is unless it can make predictions about behavior, so I can adjust my own behavior accordingly?
Speaking past one another because vomiting theories is good enough for a paycheck is such an indictment of modern science. Everyone know about the social science replication crisis, but the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing paradigm is fundamentally flawed, and we base all of hard science on it too! Particle Physics is recognized as being the most stringent applied statistical discipline, but 2 weeks ago a result (W boson mass) was published that is fundamentally incompatible with previous measurements, so one or both sets must be wrong. Even the most preeminent scientists are failing to be precise enough to weed out errors, and my fellow statisticians are happy to keep on teaching STAT 301 to engineers and scientists. What's gotta give?
It may be that the goal of statistics is prediction, but science has at least three goals - prediction, explanation, and control. Two models that make the same prediction might be different from the other points of view. Copernicus was worse than Ptolemy at predicting positions of astronomical movements, but had a better explanation for why retrograde motion happened at opposition. Neither is great at control.
I looked into that and found “After trillions of collisions and years of data collection and number crunching, the CDF team found that the W boson has slightly more mass than expected.” Hardly the same thing as a badly constructed social science experiment that doesn’t replicate - rather this is experimental science proving a well regarded theory as wrong, however minutely (it’s remarkable that theory gets so much right).
I'd caution against concluding that High-energy physicists do hypothesis testing wrong. They are obsessed with accurate models and measurements to a degree not seen in any other science or engineering, and if your reading of Jaynes makes you think that they are doing it wrong, the fault is with you, not with them. Incidentally, Bayesian calculations are bread and butter of particle physics, and there is no easy way to improve on their approaches.
Specifically, the W boson mass being incompatible with the Standard Model predictions is considered to be quite likely due to the systematic error, something in the setup or the calculations that was not properly accounted for, and that is a leading alternative hypothesis to "we have discovered hints of physics beyond the Standard Model". This is what is likely going on with a number of recent apparent "must be new physics" measurements, including g-2 and the dark energy density.
In general, LW-style disdain for frequentism and feeling superior about Bayesianism is one of the unfortunate cultish ideas unrelated to how real-world physics is done. Even with the replication crisis, the issue is not methodology (one can easily replace p-hacking with prior-hacking), but the focus on publishing rather than on accuracy and repeatability.
On the contrary, I think Bayesian epistemology is one of the most important cultish ideas championed by the rationalist community and in a few decades people will quietly assume it was "obvious" and the way it's always been done.
However, I don't know if it's major advantages are to be had in particle physics, but rather in complex systems.
> Null Hypothesis Significance Testing paradigm is fundamentally flawed
It’s just that some people fail to understand what it is. There is a reason why a typical paper that may contain a few regressions spans 20-40 pages. There is context that you need to comprehend the result correctly.
Any particular work of Jaynes? I have his "Probability Theory" but it's in my category of "read when I have free time" which is basically the same category as, "When three foreign kings bearing gifts suggest I read it."
I agree that prediction should be considered much more central to the value of models (where prediction is interpreted in the correct sense, certainly including having the right degree of confidence), but I think there is a little room for "useful pedagogical models" and other things.
+1! Can OP recommend an essay or two from [0] where Jaynes argues that "the goal of statistics is *always* prediction," and where the critique of NHST is made?
I've learned a whole lot about real estate Mass Appraisal and gotten in touch with a bunch of really smart people with the relevant credentials, several of whom we've recruited onto our team. Apparently a whole bunch of new papers in the field were published just in the last 3 years, and it seems like there's a lot of room to move both the state of the art and the state of common practice forward.
What's become quickly apparent is that this project is mostly all about data. Luckily, we've been absolutely spoiled by the OpenPhilly dataset. They have more fine-grained data than you can shake a stick at, and the majority of our work is going to consist of cleaning and merging these data sets together, then using them to reproduce the best models from the last 3 years of papers. After that our plan is to publish a paper, publish the source code, and release all the data that's not encumbered by any licensing issues (which so far is basically all of it). We would also like to set up a public website to do "live ratio studies" where we will track ongoing sales and compare the values of those properties to what our model predicts, and take particular close attention to sales of vacant land. That way if our model sucks it will be super obvious and you can all make fun of us more easily.
I also did a general survey of the data landscape of the top 20 US cities. They're surprisingly good! Most cities nowadays have slick "open data" portals with all kinds of information just free to download. Philadelphia's is still looking like it's the absolute best, but quite a lot of the others are up there.
But the absolute hands-down WORST? Silicon Valley (San Jose / Santa Clara County), ironically:
I've been involved in a few of these for commercial reasons. There's a lot of people who would pay a lot of money to be able to value houses based on publicly available or purchasable data. They've all failed, including big efforts from Zillow and Redfin. What are you doing differently from those?
ETA: Which is to say, they make an algorithm but then when they test it against the market they lose huge amounts of money.
ETA2: And if you succeed, I will gladly introduce you to people who will pay huge, huge stacks of money for it. But my default position will be skepticism.
Well, for one our goals are different. We are not trying to profit on the act of buying and selling houses. We are trying to assess values accurately enough to be able to improve on the status quo of property taxation, which is already in place.
Two, the Zillow case doesn’t seem to me to be as straightforward as you’re intimating. Have you read Matt Levine’s piece on it?
Three, our methodology is to test between three to six modes from the literature on our dataset: standard multiple regression, various tree based models, and neural network models. Each has tradeoffs we will explore and evaluate - explainability versus accuracy, for instance.
ETA: I really don't see how the "Zillow problem" -- even in the case that Levine's analysis were wrong -- is actually the same as our problem.
You seem to be asserting that we just won't be able to get the margin of error "tight enough" -- but tight enough for what? The failure state for flipping houses when you're off by even a little is very different than if you're merely assessing the value for the sake of levying a tax. Help me understand what your position is here because I'd like to fully unpack it and make sure I'm responding to the right thing.
My understanding is that the house flipping algorithm has to generate TWO estimates: an offer price, and a will-sell-for price, and it has these failure states:
- Offer is too low: you don't buy the house, lose an opportunity
- Offer is too high: you pay too much and take a loss
- Will-sell-for is too low: you don't buy the house, lose an opportunity
- Will-sell-for is too high: you earn too little and take a loss
If you're Zillow, a conservative algorithm can eke out a small profit fairly slowly (this is what happened according to Levine). But a serious business isn't interested in a slow modest profit, but the trouble is you can't juice the algorithm to be more aggressive without blowing out your profits.
The property assessment algo, on the other hand, doesn't have a distinction between offer/will-sell-for estimates, it just generates one value, and it has these two failure states:
- Too low: your tax is weaker than it could be
- Too high: you drive people off the land
The difference here is that as a property assessor -- erring on the side of caution is totally okay and actually what I want! As I mentioned in the article (image link here: https://gameofrent.com/content/images/lvt_85_chart.png) one way to consistently err on the side of caution with the assessment algorithm is to lower the amount of tax collected. As long as the tax is high enough, I get the incentives I want, and I can leave a decent chunk of land rents to the landowner and still massively improve on the status quo. And as far as I can tell the error tolerances for that problem are very different than for Zillow's.
Further, the actual policy proposal that's on the table for Georgists in most places is to collect the same amount of property taxes as we do now, but fully exempt buildings. So just shift the taxes on to land. In almost any municipality that considers this, this effective tax on land rents would fall WELL short of even 85%, probably being no more than 50%.
That gives a very big error margin to get the land values good enough, and feels very different from the laser-tight margins Zillow et al seek to achieve when they're trying to make money off of narrow profit margins on investments that put big chunks of capital at risk.
I'll respond to your edit with a longer comment tomorrow or Monday. It's a late Saturday here and I'd like to give this more intellectual firepower than I have right now.
For one: The goal doesn't matter. The method is the same. Whatever reason you want to value houses for you still have to value houses using an algorithmic method based on public data. Keep in mind, the alternative is a huge (and well funded) system of tens of thousands of people utilizing human judgment and local knowledge. That's actually a pretty high barrier. If you're just more modestly trying to supply them with a tool to help then I think that's more achievable and still admirable.
For two: Yes, I have. I've read that piece and several other pieces and, as I've said, I've seen the internals on some of this stuff. I don't think the article you linked actually supports your case. (I also have issues about the piece specifically and don't think Matt Levine knows what he's talking about.) Regardless, the issue is not high volume, high value, data rich markets. Indeed, it's been well known that limiting your markets (as Redfin does) is a good way to increase accuracy. Are you restricting yourself to urban centers? Even there, though, there were serious issues.
For three: The use and exploration of multiple models is not, in any way, new or unique to this attempt.
I guess what I'm afraid of is that you'll do a passable job and convince a state to adopt it despite not being all that it should be.
Prima facie it does seem like there is a clear difference between:
1) Trying to beat the market given a fixed tax rate
2) Setting that tax rate in the first place
If you want to argue that these things are fundamentally equivalent, you need some kind of additional premise along the lines of "market efficiency implies the current tax policy is at a sweet spot." I've never heard this principle articulated.
All of which is not to say that there is no conceivable justification to be skeptical of Georgism/LTV; risk aversion in particular seems reasonable. But I don't think that the Zillow/Redfin examples show as much as you are claiming.
> For one: The goal doesn't matter. The method is the same
I edited my above comment before you posted with a more in depth response, and in short I totally disagree! The goal changes everything! How could it not? I'm not convinced at all that the failure states and the error tolerances for these problems is at all the same.
I suppose I agree with you the error tolerances and stakes are different. But I think yours is smaller than a company's since you need to keep the will of the voters. And I think state power is to be wielded with much more caution than private industry. Do you think either goes in the other direction?
I think you overestimate the electorate regarding tax policy.
The Tories, who remain in power to this day, spent 2012 introducing a deeply divisive bedroom 'tax' (technically a reduction in benefits rather than a true tax) and getting mired in the metaphysical quandry of whether, for VAT purposes, warmth is an essential or accidental property of a freshly-baked pastry.
Meanwhile, the deeply silly stamp duty, levied on sales of real estate, still stands.
I would be surprised if they noticed that an LVT was marginally higher or lower than is optimal.
I think we need to do the math when we specifically talk about margins. How far off was Zillow’s error margin and how did that translate into putting the algorithm in the red?
If I tax land at even just 50% of its rental value I have a ton of headroom, and even more if I tax less. The hard failure state is if we overtax and drive people off the land. That’s bad and we shouldn’t do it and presumably what you’re afraid we might do.
One thing that might not have been clear is I’m not trying to make a one and done algorithm for the whole USA here, this is a limited case study with open published code and data and a front end website. And we are working with locals from Philly who know the area well.
I also agree state power has to be wielded responsibly. The status quo is the state wields its power already: and it uses it to tax buildings too much and land not enough and this rewards the wrong things and punishes the wrong things, and we can maybe improve on that somewhat without going full LVT, just by shifting existing taxes off buildings and onto land. And this tool can help any jurisdiction that has good data and wants to try that.
As for popularity, we have to deliver net benefits for the majority of the population or the whole thing never gets off the ground. I think a revenue neutral shift of property taxes into land can achieve this without invoking anything other than the bottom line - look, most of you save money on property taxes, you don’t get punished for building an accessory dwelling unit, guy who owns 5 parking lots smack dab in downtown is incentivized to sell.
Also - I am not a state! I’m a guy trying to build an open model anybody can use that’s not locked in a government or corporate vault, and that anybody can rip apart and improve upon and scrutinize and make fun of.
Has Scott written an article explaining the replication crisis from the ground up? Alternatively, is there a good, well-written introduction to the crisis from another author geared toward an intelligent reader who is wholly new to the subject? I’d like to recommend something to a friend on this topic.
Math’s crisis is, weirdly enough, caused more by pre-publishing and the difficulty of retracting papers. Although calling it a “crisis” would be a pretty big overstatement.
Is it really the worst offender? Or is it the only social science with enough integrity to actually run systematic replications? Yeah, the results don't look so great, but Sociology (for example) does not even have results.
Yeah. My experience is that social science takes research methodology more seriously than any other field, and therefore notices it's mistakes more often.
Nah. Social science obsesses over research methodology because methodology is often all they've got. When engineers get it wrong, bridges fall down and airplanes crash. When physicists get it wrong, the bombs don't go off, the laser doesn't work, and the spacecraft misses its target by 5 million miles. When electrical engineers fuck up, we get blackouts in three states. When chemists and physicians screw the pooch, products have be recalled because people end up in hospitals.
Very obvious stuff. We don't have to worry that much about the purity of our methods, because objective reality trundles along and puts all our predictions and products to the acid test, and we're left in no doubt at all whether the end result (regardless of methodology) was right or wrong.
Who can tell whether the latest sociology theory about equity and justice, or the latest economic theory about monetary policy, is God's truth or a load of total bullshit at which students will laugh in 15 years? We don't even know what to measure to try to falsify these theories. So yeah we spend a huge amount of time debating whether the method was ideal, because that's all we can do.
Has anyone here used thyroid hormone (T3 or T4) for depression, or other issues besides low thyroid?
I know it hasn’t done great in studies, but I developed severe hyperthyroidism (Graves disease) last year and it essentially cured my acute depression and showed me I had been experiencing dysthymia and the like for years. Treating the hyperthyroidism made the depression come back in full force, which is when I made the connection.
My depression is now well-controlled through a combo of Wellbutrin and remaining slightly hyperthyroid (with my endocrinologist’s blessing)
I had depression a few years ago and recovered using mainly therapy and life changes (plus stopping drinking alcohol).
I later discovered randomly via a blood test that I am hypothyroid. Retrospectively the only symptom in the top symptom list of hypothyroidism that I have ever had was depression.
I now take levothyroxine. I haven’t been depressed since but I’ve changed too many variables to indicate any causality - I think depression is so bad it is worth using every variable you can find.
I've given thyroid hormone to patients for depression before, it doesn't usually work very well. I had one patient who responded well to it, kind of like you, but it wasn't the norm.
Were your thyroid hormones within normal range when you were depressed, before you were hyperthyroid?
Yeah, I had it tested twice in the preceding 2 years, once in each acute depression period, both normal.
It’s certainly the most positively life changing event I’ve ever experienced (as far as diseases go, Graves has been pretty awesome, even beyond the depression relief); it sure would be nice to know who the small fraction of the population T3 might do similar for is.
Yeah good q. I don’t have an answer, but I’d guess that it’s better a) for patients with ‘atypical’ depression (overeating, hypersomnia, etc. rather than the opposite presentation of anorexia/insomnia), and also b) I think there’s not much good research supporting it as mono therapy for depression (unless caused by hypothyroid). Most of the studies that find benefit to it is as an augmentation strategy, on top of another anti-depressants. Another feature is that low-dose t3 (~25mcg) doesn’t seem to work. You need at least 37.5-50 mcg to start seeing benefit.
(Of course all the usual disclaimers that none of this is medical advice. Especially when dealing with thyroid, you wanna be extremely careful. You can do lots of damage if not under proper medical supervision/monitoring)
Are there AI alignment groups / companies that are remote or remote-friendly for engineers? It seems like all the major organizations are still exclusively in-office (primarily Bay, although it seems like Conjecture is in London).
Perhaps not what you're looking for, but https://www.eleuther.ai/ is a distributed collective and they do impressive practical work instead of MIRI-style theorizing.
On the other hand, they won't pay you, or anyone, anything.
Alignment is certainly discussed a lot, though most of what they are doing is capability exploration. State of the art is locked down behind "Open"AI/DeepMind's doors, so they're doing a lot of parallel development to have modern AI systems they can reason about.
They are first and foremost an AI technology org but they're considerably more interested in alignment (and, well, openness) than the rest.
Thanks. It's weakly reassuring to see that I'm not missing anything obvious, but disappointing that none of the alignment orgs have made the remote transition, given how much talent is now elsewhere (like myself).
(I would be sympathetic to the "in-person work is required for idea generation" argument if (1) I didn't hear so much about how AI alignment is engineer-constrained, not financially constrained and (2) AI alignment as a field was making great strides as it is).
The current list of remote-friendly orgs that are at least nominally focusing on AI alignment seems to be:
Fund for Alignment Research
Center for Effective Altruism
Ought
Fathom Radiant
It might also be possible to get a remote alignment-focused role somewhere like Google (e.g. with a team like Google Brain) but I'm not aware of any specific teams like that which are open to hiring remotely.
Of those, Fund for Alignment Research looks like it's doing the most "direct" work on the problem, and CEA seems to be approaching the problem from a "supporting infrastructure" angle.
It's definitely possible that I'm still missing some options. There are a few places that I haven't listed even though they're on 80000 Hours because I couldn't find any explanation of what they were working on and how it was distinguishable from capabilities advancement.
Agreed, I’ve been trying to read up on it, but it seems like all the work/working groups are Bay Area centric. Does anyone know of any alignment discussion forums at less coastal universities -- university of Michigan, UIUC, Carnegie Mellon, etc? What about fully online communities for it that aren’t solely in the LW/Yudkowsky orbit?
I agree with those saying no upvotes showing on the thread. It makes things too much like high school. But I would like to be able to put in upvotes that only the commenter sees (I guess they'd see them via email). And I'd like to receive them, too. It's natural to want to know whether your comment hit home for somebody -- why not facilitate that? Seems like there's no downside.
I dunno -- maybe a bit. On the other hand, in an in-person conversation you can see the other person's reactions to what you're saying on their face, and of course in real conversations the person generally has to say something when it's their turn, and often will feel called upon to tell you about their likes and/or dislikes of what you just said. I think most us who are mature hold up reasonably well under those circumstances and don't get pulled into saying what will get approval, rather than what we think. So receiving a heart from an individual, or even a few individuals, seems to replicate real life conversation and its feedback fairly well.
Upvotes showing on the thread -- that's way different. That's like getting jeers or adulation from a mob. I agree that that's disorienting even to people who have their heads screwed on reasonably straight.
That is literally exactly how the system works with the plug-in. You should be getting emails when people use the plugin to upvote your comment, because all it does is un-comment-out the upvote stuff
Up & down votes are default substack functions, and Scott specifically asked for them to be removed, because they are *horrible* for viewpoint diversity. Source: every forum that has upvotes and downvotes ever.
Really ...why? I mean I guess I'm ok with it for the most part, since upvotes and downvotes, ratios etc. seem to be kind of a proxy for a popularity contest (though to be fair not that applicable in the "real world", since e.g. on Canadian Twitter the conservatives seem to get more favourable responses than the liberals, but that doesn't necessarily translate into votes...).
Tangential to your main thrust, but for point one I don't think this is an example at all. Regan put forward rhetoric about small government but I've never once previously heard it argued that tax cuts where this type of brinksmanship. I'd be curious to see if you have any contemporaneous quotes or indications arguing this. While I think Reagan clearly would have viewed lower taxes as the moral thing to do a priori; the tax cuts were publicly touted and justified at the time as an intended boon to tax revenues based on the Laffer Curve ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#Reaganomics ) and 7/8 years under Reagan saw federal tax revenue increase, with the total increase beating inflation over his terms.
If he was trying to shrink government by starting revenue he clearly failed. There's maybe some argument to be made that GDP growth beat tax revenue growth by enough that the percent of the US economy that the federal government was directly controlling via purse strings/direct non-deficit spending decreased and thus government effectively "shrank", but the debt and deficit are clearly issues of increased spending, not decreased revenue.
Deficit spending clearly increased under Regan, but it already existed previously so there was no red line there that anyone could have counted on to not get crossed either. There's also no red line between what a sustainable vs unsustainable deficit is either. Not saying nobody could have been crazy enough to come up with or believe in such a scheme, but I would take some convincing to believe it actually happened in this case.
> Regan put forward rhetoric about small government but I've never once previously heard it argued that tax cuts where this type of brinksmanship.
I've heard, from a Republican who approved of it, that the point of the tax cuts was to "starve the beast" and reduce spending. Googling "starve the beast" turns up a bunch of stuff about this.
Thanks for the phrase to search and see comment above, I've definitely learned something and filled in a blind spot today. I've been frustrated for years with people trying to attack Reagan tax policy on spurious grounds, now I wonder how frustrating it would be to talk to a "Starve the Beast" supporter who likes Reagan after pointing out his policies certainly didn't decrease tax revenue...
"Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker"
Reagan should have considered the likely dynamic, and consequences, if the kid knows a loan shark who knows his father is loaded.
Fascinating, thanks to you and Bullseye for that information and phrase so search. Guess I need to increase my priors on politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouth depending on what they think their audience will lap up the most even more. And also reflect on how my bubble only fed me "Reagan was about the Laffer curve to increase revenue while lowering taxes" and not "starve the beast".
In retrospect if I didn't have the fore-knowledge that Reagan did make the Laffer curve argument at all I wouldn't be one whit surprised at "Starve the Beast" being a his position, especially with that turn of phrase. Searching now I'm especially surprised that I can't find anything talking about the disconnect here between these two viewpoints on tax policy from the same administration. This is also the era that brought us "Voodoo Economics" as a phrase and it seems it should have been particularly easy to win points for pointing out the, for lack of a better term, hypocrisy here.
Part of me is tempted to think that current general leading ideological opponents of Reagan-ish thinking would rather be able to claim that his tax policies led to deficit and debt so they push that perspective, whereas if they were reminding us of the starve the beast ideology it's easier to spin Reagan correct. I know at the end of the day the policies and agendas supporting them are more complicated than a single slogan either way can sum up.
No specialist knowledge, but have sometimes idly wondered whether JFK had ADHD, and was effectively self-medicating with the amphetamines he took. I don't think he was seen as particularly ambitious or focused earlier in life, so if that was the case you could argue that his presidency was the product of a brief window in which amphetamine use was widespread, and if he hadn't been killed, his political career would have fallen apart as the amphetamines were withdrawn.
MacMillan, the British Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, was a similarly late developer, who did retreat from public life after 1963 although he was still a relatively young and healthy man - though so far as I know there's no suggestion he was taking amphetamines while PM.
Let me plug William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. This was an attempt to found a sort of science of religion. Spiritual experience being a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon, how scientific or rational is it really to reject so many data points and come to conclusions that better fit our own physicalist biases? Instead, James sought to catalogue and study these accounts (including his own). No one took up his project, or course. But a rational religion, to have any meaning, would have to account for the Transcendent in a way other than knee-jerk dismissal (e.g delusions or quirk of cognitive physical processes).
My understanding from friends who are Unitarian Universalists is that this is actually a religion that has managed to focus on the advantages of religion, general (such as community and the like), while avoiding most of the problems of religions, particular (such as weird metaphysics and hateful rules).
Yeah, but it's piggybacking on the corpses of two former churches - the Universalists who used to have a Bible and cross as their church seal, then a cross alone, and now they've joined in with the Unitarians who did away with the messy problem of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ - nothing. Well, the "flaming chalice" which looks more like a lamp to me than a chalice, and is certainly nothing to do with the Eucharist, either symbolic or real Blood of Christ. The current practice is very far removed from Jan Hus promoting the reception by the laity of the chalice:
"Many Unitarian Universalist and Unitarian congregations and organizations feature flaming chalice symbolism on their signs, logos, and in their meeting places. Some congregations light a chalice displayed prominently in their worship space while saying opening words at the beginning of weekly worship services. The texts used during these "chalice lightings" vary; some congregations use a ritual formula while at others these words are spoken extemporaneously"
The UUs had the shape of a church and congregations and all the rest of it from their history. They may have watered down the theology to the point where it's all water but they still copy the old practices of rituals. They didn't have to invent it all from the ground up. It's easy to "focus on the advantages of religion such as community and the like" when you start off with all the trappings of traditional religion and then just keep subtracting away "weird metaphysics and hateful rules".
Exactly. It started as two ordinary Christian denominations (maybe mildly heretical) one denying the weirdest Christian metaphysics (the Trinity) and the other denying some of the hateful stuff (ie that god sends people to hell) and they gradually evolved to get rid of the rest. But because they evolved rather than being designed self consciously, they seem to function more like a religion than many rationalist attempts to create one would.
That's only partially tongue-in-cheek. I feel like a religion that couldn't launch a crusade to retake the Holy Land is also a religion that'll fail you in times of personal crisis. The fanatic zeal seems like both a bug and a feature, and I don't think they can be separated into something that is lukewarm and chill most of the time but turns into a rock-solid foundation and endless source of inner fire on demand.
"The fanatic zeal seems like both a bug and a feature, and I don't think they can be separated into something that is lukewarm and chill most of the time but turns into a rock-solid foundation and endless source of inner fire on demand."
First, you have to be very sure about what the "benefits" are that you want. You include "giving answers to difficult metaphysical questions that are beyond the scope of empiricism but nonetheless pressing among many people", but then go on about "supernatural falsehood" and the "sin of faith".
So what do you want? If you want empirical answers, then there is the scientific method to investigate the nature of reality. If you want a sense of community, following a sports team will give you that. If you want the benefits without putting in the work, you are like the other animals in the story of the Little Red Hen, who didn't help with the preparation but were willing to eat the bread once baked.
You can't do that. There are plenty of denominations which are willing to throw out traditional interpretations of Scripture and doctrines to fit with the Zeitgeist; the UUs as mentioned below are one, but there are plenty of liberal Christian churches doing the same.
You want to get people to come together, sign up to a code of conduct, agree on a standard of ethics, and meet up every so often to engage in mutual support and activities. Why do you need a religion for that? You can have it as games night with your D&D group. Or the rationalist Solstice festival.
Yes, let's become fit for the modern, industrialised age! Why, we have the spinning jenny now, unlike our benighted ancestors! And meanwhile, we still have the same problems of "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" and all the destructive impulses of the human heart.
What you are asking has been tried before, and is being tried over and over again. You can have as many ethical reading rooms as you like, but don't call that "a rationalist religion" because you'll end up with neither a religion, nor rationalism, nor any of the benefits you are seeking, because you can't have the loaf if you haven't sown the wheat and ground the flour and baked the bread.
"The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.” They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men. - G.K, Chesterton, Orthodoxy"
I wonder about that quote. How many people respected the holy place because it was holy, and how many because they wanted social order and would rather avoid being hit?
After a few generations of some people doing the first and some people doing the second, is there even a difference? I'm reminded of Christianity used as a social contract in premodern times, as in "that guy is godless" being shorthand for "that guy is a sociopath, doesn't follow rules and will defect on you every time, avoid him". Hence at least surface allegiance to the Church was necessary for people to trust you at all. This also explains why so many wars were started over heresies.
The problem with a single religion is that most religions are unpalatable to certain kinds of personalities, unless you allow a very wide range of interpretations (which is how this problem was usually solved in practice). However, then the religion drifts into however the secular society around it wants to live anyway, much like Christianity turned into a mirror image of medieval politics.
Huh, if a single religion is good for the reasons you cited. (which I mostly agree with.) Then why is more than one bad? People in different places had different needs and traditions and such and so made different religions. Religious belief doesn't stop people from doing excellent work in the sciences. (I see science as the highest form of rationalism.)
I’m pretty sure Machine Interface was not trying not to contrast between one religion and multiple, but rather between the abstract concept of religion and actual existing religions. Using singular/plural to indicate that here is a stylistic choice that’s not really common in everyday life, so I’m glad you asked.
I know they literally say “Religion, singular” but I think it would be more accurate to interpret that as “a hypothetical (singular) optimal instantiation of religion, whatever that may be.” The plural usage is a little clearer.
I agree with you completely that ideally there likely would be regional differences in religion. And MI might agree as well.
Huh OK, thanks for the correction. So are you suggesting that MI likes religion in theory, but not in practice? In which case I say go taste more religions.
I mean, there's a couple reasons. But here's sort of the big ones:
Authority!
So, you go "hey, what if we could get all these good things religions have, in terms of community, or obligations to each other, etc.? But without any of the belief stuff, that stuff is real dumb, those dumb dumbies; I'm machine interface.
But then in the same breath you mention dogma as a negative - i.e. the part people believe is true *beyond them*, the part that they think is bigger and more reliable than their own reason. This implies, strongly, that whatever religion you think can come out of rationalism WON'T have this. Can't, it's dumb and harmful.
So then you decide, OK, let's make a religion of people that all come to a morality that seems to make sense to them based on their own reason, and enforce it based NOT on whatever fake deity's fake consequences they think they are (those fools, I'm machine interface) but instead based on what they can get outside of that - i.e., social standards.
And then you look around and find that's every non-religious or non-serious-religion on earth; we already have that, it's called just being an atheist. They just do whatever they think is right when they want to do right, and when they don't want to do right they are just constrained by social norms/governmental controls. Done deal, congrats, that's what you get when you want that, you can argue it's bad or good but we already have it.
So you go, OK, but, maybe the problem is not one of believing all the dumb stuff is true, but the PAGENTRY. Like maybe it's the having buildings to go to as groups where we think very hard about being good together, but also it's just sort of a general concept of good - we aren't enforcing a dogma, so we just have like six or seven platitudes about like respecting humanity and the like, being generally nice, but we all sort of tacitly agree that either there's no truth, or that if there is that we don't know it, or that if there is it isn't very specific in a way where you could ever build any rules off it. If someone tried to make a rule, you could go "offa me with that dogma! I have reasoned that this particular rule is bullshit, and my individual faith I've built for myself is separate from yours - do not infringe." And if anybody really tries to push it on you, like the community as a whole, you can just sorta call them assholes, because there isn't any actual, hard factual truth they could possibly be drawing on; You can disagree based on your own reason.
And you look around, and you find out we already have that - it's called Unitarian Universalism and it's, you know, we can argue about whether or not it's effective and makes changes in people's lives, but it already exists, that's what you get when you try that.
And so you go, yeah, but, like, social enforcement mechanisms aren't the only way. All of those are sort of voluntary things, like yeah a guy can just ignore social threats as an atheist, and yeah a universalist can just sorta ignore rulemaking besides really, really general truisms basically everyone believes with or without religion. But what if we did some work on it, and got a bunch of us together and agreed on a consensus morality, and then we got enough of us that we could enforce it in various ways? Like maybe with financial penalties, or forcing people to be socially apart, or something".
And then you look around and we already have that, and it's called government. And you can argue whether it's good or bad, but we already have it.
Now, all of this is fine if you are sort of just generically anti-religion in a sort of pedestrian reddit sort of way. But that's actually not what you really run into in rationalist communities the most; there's actually a ton of people specifically saying "religion has SPECIFIC benefits we want, that we've observed; we want those SPECIFIC elements of community, and can't get them ourselves, we've tried, oh god are we lonely/isolated/sad". And what they are asking for, those kind, is how they can get those things without believing any of it.
Or maybe I'm wrong about all of that, too. But if so, what the second group of people has to grapple with is figuring out a basic question: If it's not the supernatural that lets the dummies get the results they want and it's not belief itself and thus is "gettable" by the non-believer-, then what is it? It's not anything that could possibly have any authority over us (besides the government option) so what is it?
But it's hard to find out, because it's not like there aren't people thinking really hard about society and groups and how to improve them; they've tried a whole bunch of stuff already and all the low-hanging fruit is already gone. This general think-real-hard-about-things thing is called philosophy, and you can agree or disagree about how good it is, but we already have it.
Yeah, and for the record I'm not trying to dig on it. I'm more saying, just, there's a lot of variation you can get, but most of it we already have in a broad-strokes way.
And it's also sort of true even for things that are built on belief, or at least nominally are. Like, want to try out just saying you are Christian but that's literally all you do? We've got that. 2 times a year? Got that. Want a religion where you can't kill bugs? We've got one of those. Do you ever feel like your gods don't have enough arms? We've got that covered.
Good take! So, what you say it's like: Problem: "How to build the perfect car for a/the rationalist (community)?" does not make sense as "There are cars of all sorts, already: fast, small, big, electric, farting-if-spouse-sits-down." -right? Seem correct, gone now for some cycling. ;)
Well, and very specifically for the "let's build a new religion, but without things that we believe exist in authority above our reason", it's like saying "We all know how gauche and stupid semi-trucks are, on account of their dumb bigness. I propose some kind of semi truck that works around this problem."
In that case, you first point out that there's a good chance people want the semi truck because of its bigness, that the bigness might be part of the appeal and function in the first place. But after that, you have, as you said, lots of non-big cars; all of them work for a purpose, but none for this purpose very well, and you have to ask why.
Thanks! I kinda lost that point. Right you are! (Finding sth. above *my* reason should not be too hard. Or below. Or. Rational Religion is kinda dry rain.)
Rationalism is not capable of creating meaningful religion. It has too many limitations and cannot escape its own hall of mirrors, leaving it unable to truly appreciate and encourage the divine.
Japan is only "not religious" if you insist on using a highly Western framework of what religion is. The Japanese state is still, by their own laws, considered to be ruled by a god-king and has no meaningful separation between secular and religious matters. Their state government directly subsidizes religious organizations under the guise of "cultural preservation".
And yet the vast majority of people in Japan still observe religious holidays in religious modes and perform religious rituals. They participate, quite literally, in pagan civic religion. This looks very different from being a Christian or similar.
Ah, yes, but here is the sticky wicket: Shinto is a pagan religion. Shinto does not require you to hold some deep, burning, fervent belief in the reality of Amaterasu-no-Mikoto or Inari-daimyojin or the Seven Fortune Gods- it merely requires you to accept the importance of a few specific concepts (purity and impurity, a certain amount of acceptance of the validity of divination, ki or vital essence exists and is important in some capacity, and of course life after death) and then toss some yen in the donation box in exchange for a fortune charm when you want to get top score on your exams or are worried about a promotion at work. If you're really into it you can go beyond that and have a priest bless your house and your car or have your fortune told or make a little shrine to your dead grandfather in a corner of the sitting room to venerate his soul, but those aren't necessary. Paganism is passive- it's just something you do because it's what people do. It isn't like the Abrahamic faiths, which demand active and near-constant engagement and that one center one's life entirely around the ideology. Therefore, systemic examinations based on a Western lens, which uses the Abrahamic faiths as their template for what religion "should " look like can't really capture or even conceptualize pagan faith in an effective manner. And indeed, the famous "basically everyone in Japan is secularized" studies fail FOR EXACTLY THIS REASON. They considered someone to only be Shintoist if they were on the rolls of a temple's membership. Membership in a temple is the domain primarily of priests and aspiring ascetics, so naturally this does not reflect the total number of Shintoists in the same way that counting only ordained priests would not reflect the total number of Christians.
"After all, Scandinavia and Japan, some of the least religious places in the world, are also some of the most socially and politically functional countries."
I don't know about Scandinavia; they have state churches - the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark and the Church of Sweden are Lutheran, the Church of Finland (also Lutheran) was a state church until disestablishment. Yes, those societies are very secular and there's a lot of 'cultural Lutheranism', you might say; officially a member of the church but in practice only attending for weddings, baptisms and funerals. On the other hand, because there is/was one dominant church, that has left a mark on the culture that America, with its grab-bag of various denominations right from the start, can't replicate.
Japan also has cultural Shintoism/Buddhism; people may not consider themselves religious or attend services, but at the same time they'll engage in cultural practices such as memorial services for aborted children:
> When will we meet god? When we die. It is the ultimate deference of truth, you literally have to wait until you die to confirm whether your theories about the world are true.
I don’t think this is quite correct. The judgment of God is deferred and for that you’ll have to wait. But God is “met” the instant God is let into one’s life. At least, that is what I would argue.
Give Directly do just that, and are one of GiveWell's top charities.
Here's a podcast interview with the co-founder. It discusses some of the pros and cons. I get the impression it is thought to work pretty great in developing countries, but wouldn't in a place like San Fransisco - though I don't recall them going into much detail in the interview as to why.
Edit: I suppose they don't give money to people "on the street" - they have various criteria they experiment with over time for who they give money to.
In theory, very poor people in Africa are much poorer than people you'd find in most other places. In practice, I'm not sure - they usually have a house and a small farm, and even though those things might be cheap, they might be in some sense better than the average urban poor lifestyle. It sounds like you live in a poorer country, so I'm not sure how that figures in.
According to random spitball figures from people who think about this a lot, on some kind of strong utilitarian framework the top EA charities (eg Against Malaria) are ~10x more effective than GiveDirectly. If you differ from strict utilitarianism somehow (eg you care more about making people happy than saving lives) that calculation might come out differently.
I think depending on your ethical system it's not crazy to think this might work.
Frankly, I'd put my money into malaria prevention and clean drinking water. The problem with giving directly to "poor" people is that you distort existing social patterns and arrangements, create suspicion and jealousy, and develop, in miniature, the kind of dependency culture that the aid industry creates at the macro level.
A friend of mine in South Africa (not particularly well paid university job) employed a gardener some years ago, paying him a decent wage. Then the gardener came to ask for money for his child who needed medical care. Then it was another child who needed money for books and stationery for school. Then it was a brother, then a cousin. And all of these were, at least in theory, genuine financial emergencies which could be cured by gifts of money. As a good former revolutionary and Marxist, my friend had some difficulty deciding what to do, since he was aware that by giving small dollops of charity to individuals he was effectively perpetuating the system, if not making it worse. But then as he said, what else can you do?
As someone who's actually been in a lot of the poor places I agree there's a subjective difference. A lot of Africa is in what I call functional poverty. The average person has food and housing and works decently. The big issue is when they need something their local community doesn't produce like medicine. Because they have nothing to trade with the outside world they need to rely on charity. And that often fails. But in a day to day sense they might live in a village but they're fed, clothed, and have basic dignity. They're not poor because something went wrong. They're poor because their country hasn't industrialized yet and poverty is the default.
This is in contrast to what I call dysfunctional poverty. My go to example used to be pre-invasion Ukraine. I need to find another but until then: Ukraine outside of major cities had issues with simple food distribution. Some people fell into absolute poverty because they used to get food and clothes and all that supplied in the old system. And that system collapsed and people were thrust into poverty by that collapse. They are poor because something went very, very wrong. In some sense they're better off: more cars, more roads, productive modern industry. But in another they literally had trouble getting food. (This was improving significantly post-Yanukovich. Probably worse now.)
This is why I make the point that different regions need different strategies for aid. Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else. Economic development like helping them found factories is the best thing you can do. Since I believe in export led industrialization that means helping African products to wealthier markets. And until it does that it needs some bridge help to prevent people from getting malaria or dying from lack of medicine. Ukraine, especially now, literally needs food. The harvest isn't coming in due to the invasion. They don't really need help developing port infrastructure or factories or export markets. Even in peace, they already have these things. Things that can speed the adaptation to the new norm would help too. But just introducing modern technology won't do much. (And some areas are mostly blocked by politics or civil society. But certainly not everywhere!)
To take a simple example: there are a lot of places in Africa that still use old traditional hand milling techniques. You can help simply by starting industrial mills and exporting to the west. (A lot of traditional African grains are non-gluten, by the way.) Ukraine does not need mills. It has mills. Lots of mills. They're a little less advanced than western mills I guess. But Soviet style grain milling is mostly fine. And they do export to the west already (and to other places).
"Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else"
This has been argued since at least the 60s, and was an article of faith both among the first generation of African leaders, and the IMF/World Bank. They persuaded African states to specialise in cash crops and raw materials for export, to generate funds for investment in industry and infrastructure. Fifty years ago, it was assumed that Africa today would be at least at the level of South America, if not Europe. African leaders wanted developed states patterned after the West, and thought they could be constructed quickly. The reason it didn't work, of course, was that raw material prices were deregulated in the 80s, and food prices fluctuated wildly. Oil also went up to levels that were undreamed of when these clever plans were formulated. So African countries had to indebt themselves to feed their populations, when previously they had been self-sufficient in food. There's some industry in Africa, but in most parts of the continent there's no chance of local industry competing with imported Chinese goods. Distribution is another huge problem, because the railroads that do exist mainly date from the colonial era, and go from the interior to the sea. Even today, most goods are moved around by sea or by long-distance lorries.
Don't forget either that Africa is becoming increasingly urbanised. Lagos, for example, has a population of at least 20 million, living mostly in slums without services or security. There are huge numbers of young men that the land can no longer support, and who are forced to travel to the cities to work so they can get money to marry. The poverty in some of these areas is indescribable.
Part of the reason Africa has to import food is a consumer shift off of traditional African diets onto more standard international diets too. For example, Africa now consumes much more wheat and beef than it used to. It's part of rising living standards in a region that has relatively poor soil for agriculture.
I agree that the cash crop export strategy didn't actually work. To do otherwise would be denying reality, imo. And I agree there's a lot of infrastructure work to be done. The issue being finding money to pay for it. I don't agree that industry has no chance or that it hasn't worked. Not only is Africa competing with China but China has come to Africa in search of cheap manufacturing labor!
The poverty in the Lagos slums is really bad. Whether it's worse than poverty in the countryside... I wouldn't say that. I'd say urban life, while it's more cramped and dirty, does tend to be better.
Though again, like in various Latin American slums, the issue seemed (to me) to be chronic unemployment. Not, as in the post-collapse Eastern Europe, literally that the entire food distribution system had been shut down. There were shops and all that. From my point of view, the issue was there was no consistent work and what work there was was low paying.
I've heard part of this story many times--the part about people migrating to big cities because they have to for economic reasons. It often goes along with a second part, which is that the migration of all these people to the big cities for economic reasons makes them all worse off than they were before. E.g., this is the standard narrative of the English Industrial Revolution.
This has always struck me as not making sense. Why would people leave the country in droves to go to a big city where conditions are worse? Especially when, with some major exceptions like the medieval-to-Renaissance enclosure movement, often they migrate to the big cities even though nothing has gotten worse in agriculture. Even if agriculture had been unsuccessfully modernized, people could still pick up the hoe and sickle and do it the old-fashioned way; the land is still there.
So this suggests 2 possible alternative interpretations of this general kind of migration to me:
1. People who migrate to big cities to live in filthy slums and be dirt poor aren't worse-off than before. They're better-off. Their poverty is just a lot more visible, instead of being hidden scattered around thousands of little towns.
2. Moving to the big city is buying a lottery ticket.
I appreciate the link to the model, but I think it favors answer 1 (at least, as I meant it). I should have said "People migrate to cities until city and country wages equilibriate"; what I wrote focused only on what *starts* migration to cities. By answer 2 (lottery ticket) I meant that the equilibrium could be one in which urban wages are lower by average or median, but have higher variance, and people are overly-optimistic, so prefer the higher-variance lower-average wage.
This is in concordance with the observation that lots of working-class people buy lottery tickets, and also with the observation found in polls that most people think they will do better than the average in their peer group economically. It's at odds with the belief that humans are risk-averse, which also has empirical support.
People migrate to the cities because of the germ theory of disease. When six of your eight children survive to adulthood rather than just two, the land must be divided.
In the English case, it certainly didn't make sense. Effectively, people had to be forced off the land by laws and enclosures, accompanied by force if necessary, to go and work in factories. It was the only way employers could get a workforce.
Africa is so huge and varied a continent that I hesitate to suggest particular reasons, but some that I know of are: pressure on food resources with growing populations, caused in turn by lower infant mortality; changes in diet; changes in social attitudes and increasing restlessness among a better-educated youth; a surplus of young males unable to find wives; the lure of the city on smartphones that most Africans now have; the possibility, no matter how faint, of making it rich .... and many others.
My experience, admittedly an outside perspective, is 1. Urban wealth and rural poverty is a pattern in pretty much every society. You have more land in rural areas and so somewhat nicer houses. But there's more money to be had in the cities and more modern facilities. There are, of course, real changes like the square footage of your home gets smaller and pollution is worse and social fabric is more frayed. But there's also more money to be made and more freedom to non-conform.
Ideally, of course, the apartments would be decent and the wages higher.
In the case of England, some portion of urban movement was "encouraged" by the Enclosure Acts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts), which centralized land ownership and extinguished many traditional tenancy arrangements.
You might consider the story to be one of improving state capacity, where land ownership and control could be more regimented and centralized than in the earliest portion of the modern era.
You can also see how this process can happen voluntarily, even without coercion. If you imagine a freehold subsistence farm in today's suburban/exurban environment, it's to the current owners' benefit to sell to a more efficient agricultural concern and move to the city. It's a kind of lottery ticket, but it's a ticket that the migrant is paid to take.
> Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else.
Read up a bit on comparative advantage, and on some more advanced economics (specifically what is sometimes called "coordination problems"), in books such as Samuel Bowles's _Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution_. And some ethnography, unfashionable as that is these days. McCloskey's _Bourgeois_ trilogy might be a starting point, although a somewhat elliptical one. And although Fukuyama's particular examples are perhaps badly chosen, his thesis in _Trust_ has relevance for development theory and practice.
Africa needs at least two things to change before it attempts to industrialize, in order that attempting to industrialize has a chance of actually reducing poverty.
First, for OECD countries, primarily the EU (because it is the closest large market), to stop blocking imports of African agricultural exports with tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quotas and extreme subsidization of their own farmers. Industrializing agriculture seems to be the path to starting manufacturing, and for that farmers need cashflow to invest.
Second, cultural institutions. In most societies, customary (automatic) behaviour is kin preference: having your idiot cousin with impulse control issues and a gambling problem run your business is *obviously better* than having a competent but unrelated-to-you person do that, because your idiot cousin is related to you. The exceptions to kin preference tend to be in the OECD.
This second problem both comes from and contributes to a zero-sum, zero-trust view of the world that keeps nearly everyone mired in poverty.
Without replacing kin preference with institutions that make trusting non-relatives the default, such as the rule of law, any successful entrepreneurial activity will be expropriated by local or national strongmen (those with the biggest kin groups), who then put their idiot cousin with impulse control issues and a major gambling problem in charge, with the expected results.
The knowledge that your society works like this, er, ...disincentivizes entrepreneurship. Or, perhaps, encourages people with get-up-and-go to get up and go to the USA.
The first problem may be solvable this century. The second...I have no idea how that might happen.
The EU is a major producer of food itself. I’ve never believed that Africa would ever be efficient in exporting food until it industrialises. Africa is a cheap producer of food because they earn so little, but this is farming inefficiency not a cheap labour market waiting to be exploited. In any case the EU, rightly, had tried to keep itself food secure. I personally think the recent deal with South America was a mistake.
The EU is a major producer of food itself. I’ve never believed that Africa would ever be efficient in exporting food until it industrialises. Africa is a cheap producer of food because they earn so little, but this is farming inefficiency not a cheap labour market waiting to be exploited. In any case the EU, rightly, had tried to keep itself food secure. I personally think the recent deal with South America was a mistake.
I've read up on comparative advantage and a little about development economics. I've read all your recommendations except the Bourgeois trilogy. If you have something to add about them beyond a book list I'm all ears. Because as it is, it seems like you're in a non-sequitur. Comparative advantage, for example, might be relevant if I was suggesting they stop producing what they already produce. But I'm not. Modernization and industrialization don't inherently mean direct competition with China.
I agree Africa needs to develop external markets. I said as much. And some of it is due to regulation. However, the US and some mid-income countries have notably opened up their markets to Africa. The reason for a lack of connection is partly regulation but its partly just doing the work of sourcing and moving goods. Now, states could do a better job of supporting this through infrastructure et al. But unless you can become president of some African state that's the best, you as an individual person, can do.
As for corruption and tribal loyalty that varies by location. In some places I agree it's more or less intractable. In other places it's weak enough to be overcome. In some places it's almost absent. As I've pointed out elsewhere, these places with strong institutions do tend to be richer than their neighbors but still poor by international standards.
"First, for OECD countries, primarily the EU (because it is the closest large market), to stop blocking imports of African agricultural exports with tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quotas and extreme subsidization of their own farmers. Industrializing agriculture seems to be the path to starting manufacturing, and for that farmers need cashflow to invest."
The problem is that countries have very strong incentives to protect their own agricultural economy.
What you call functional poverty sounds like feudalism. Peasants got what they needed to survive; but without a cash economy, they had no way to buy anything non-local, or to accumulate wealth.
Maybe a big part of the reason they don't have mid-grade tech in some parts of Africa is that, if they're in a barter economy, there isn't any practical way for a company to /sell/ them anything. The free market won't work for them if they're not a market.
Feudalism is hardly a useful term for discussion of poverty without the essential hierarchy of lordship. There's no real material difference between the peasantry of a feudal society and those of another system with peasantry. The difference is at the top of society.
Note also that the classical model of feudalism allowed that peasants could, and in some circumstances (my go to here is England in the later middle ages) would become much more prosperous and access markets. It's very important point for Marx for example, as this is what allowed the creation of a bourgeoisie.
It depends on the region but West Africa, for example, tends to have the peasants owning their own land. Which is certainly a kind of historical economy but not feudalism where there are wealthy landlords running around.
It's not hard to sell them anything. The issue is simply that producing a farm's worth of wheat or bananas is good at provisioning calories but not as good at getting dollars on the international market. This is key to the whole path dependence/queue theory of international development.
On your first point, I think the best argument for giving to poor people in poor countries is not that they are worse off than the poor in rich countries but rather that a given amount of money goes much further. If I donate $100 to someone in a poor country where the cost of living is 10x less than the US, then that money would be about as useful to them as $1000 would be to someone in the US.
Depends what you're doing with the money. If it's just a question of pure consumption, what will make people happier, $1 definitely generates more utilons in a dirt-poor country.
But most of the big flows of money internationally are about investment, not consumption. And $1 invested in the First World actually does much better (for the investor and, ultimately, the world) than it does invested in the Third World. You give $1 to Katalin Karikó and you get (part of) a revolution in mRNA technology, that has already saved millions of lives and $trillions in economic output, and opened the doors to whole new fields of medical therapy research. You give $1 to a farmer in Nigeria and...he can buy a nice metal hoe to cut down the time he needs to spend weeding from 4 hours a day to 1. Very nice for him, of course, but the leverage is not even in the same universality class.
That's *why* the bulk of the international money flow is *from* poorer nations *to* richer nations. Because even people in the Third World want to invest their money where it has the best ROI.
I agree. I think these are related points, in that marginal utility of more money is highest when you're already very poor, but I guess you're right that there's a completely separate purchasing power issue.
I'll agree with other posters who said that median is likely a better measure than average. I recall something like 14 families owned pretty much all of a South American country (I want to say Columbia) at one point, meaning the typical resident was far poorer than it would seem using an average.
That said, I think you are badly underestimating how poor the US was in 1950, especially in certain areas. What we tend to see from the 1950s is far more polished and commercialized than what we don't see, because it's the music, movies, and other media that we can witness. We can't see the daily lives of the very poor. My dad was born in the 1950s, and grew up in a house with no electricity or running water, and it had dirt floors. This was in the southern US, and was not unusual for the area (that half of the state they lived in). There are many places across the South that were desperately poor at that time, in ways we would struggle to comprehend.
Where do you get the link between the 1950s US and prosperity? The media image seems to be focused on the growing middle class, not the experience of say a West Virginian miner or a black Alabama farmer, who were likely still dirt poor at that point. Less poor than the previous generation but not in the television-owning class
My mother's huge extended family in Oklahoma/Kansas lived through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, then all the upheavals and rationing and whatnot of WW II, then in 1947 were directly in the path of one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in U.S. history cause sure why not.
As of the early 1950s they were living in circumstances which they and everyone else of that time considered to be working-class or the bottom half of middle-class, several rungs above "dirt-poor". And I am here to say -- with confidence because I am the family-tree nut and have in my possession lots of photos and letters and whatnot from exactly that time period -- that by any modern American's standards they in 1950 were poor. But they were far better off than what living in poverty in the U.S. meant in 1950.
I suspect a big factor in the link (real or apparent) between prosperity and the 1950s US comes from the rebound following WW2. Domestically, the US demobilized from something approaching a total war footing: by 1945 @bout a third of the adult male population serving as active duty military and a huge portion of the nation's industry had been redirected towards ear production, and after the war the men and industrial capacity were largely returned back to the civilian economy, greatly boosting both standard of living (compared to the wartime baseline people were used to) and ongoing growth in the civilian economy due to a catch-up growth effect combined with more resources available for capital investment.
Then there's international trade. WW2 devastated most of the most economically developed parts of the world due to large scale bombing and fought-over territory. This was compounded by other wartime effects: stupendous degrees of institutional disruption (ranging from kleptocratic to genocidal in Axis-occupied territories), tight blockades and widespread commerce raiding, and most major belligerents mobilizing their populations and economies to a substantially greater extent than the US. The net economic effect of this is that the US share of global GDP ranges from around 20% during most of the interwar years to a peak of 35% in 1945, and not due primarily to growth of the US domestic economy. As major US trading partners, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia, rebuilt their economies, US share of global GDP declined back to the 20-25% range, again not because of a decline or stagnation on the US side.
This catch-up growth in Europe and Asia provided two major benefits to the US economy. One was large and sustained growth in opportunities for gains through trade. The other is that Allied countries (particularly Britain and France) were able to make payments of their war debts owed substantially to the US government and American private banks and investors: not just lend-lease and other WW2 debts, but also the still-considerable loan balances left over from their WW1 debts.
The 50s were a period in which poverty significantly decreased for blacks precisely because they were moving out of the south and to northern cities where pay for industrial jobs was higher. A decent amount of that was happening for southern whites as well.
That's undoubtedly correct, but even so I doubt that the life of a (non-skilled) industrial worker was anything like the TV-produced image of the 1950s, which seems to be of a prosperous middle-class small town (no idea if these actually existed) without notable rural poverty or the like.
Everyone's granpa wasn't in Korea and had their life saved there by extremely witty alcoholic surgeon? Leather jacket and greaser haircut couldn't turn a HS dropout auto mechanic into most coolest person ever? Later on, one couldn't run into comically interesting shrinks in bars in Boston or eclectic housemates in NYC? FBI didn't spend most of the 1990s investigating paranormal activity (which mysteriously never included extremely bright and long-lived collie who regularly saved farm boys and forest rangers out of tight spots for three decades?) Chemistry teachers don't cook illegal drugs and if they were, they are not caught in a web of crime and justice consisting of mob bosses, police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers, P.I.s and random individuals who have more wildly varied and most interesting social lives than anyone you'd met, except possibly in hospital?
I hope Colorado has the most horrible problem preteens; that one must be reflective of real life.
Not sure whether they accounted for this, but something that immediately comes to mind is that a lot of real economic activity in 1950 US wouldn't have been counted in GDP measures due to being internal to an economic entity and hence non-monetised (e.g. childcare by parents, homemaking by wives, subsistence by farmers).
No, I could understand that, and it shows the limits of looking at incomes as a measure. You might have a lower income, but also a much more functional state and a narrower range of incomes (averages can hide some pretty severe spreads on income, including extreme poverty).
I'm not sure that average is a useful measure for this sort of comparison.
If a few people have most of the wealth, everyone else can be very poor indeed, in spite of a respectable average income.
IIRC, Inequality was a lot less in the 1950s than it is today, particularly in the richest countries. Some "developing" countries have levels of inequality that make today's USA look egalitarian. And the world as a whole probably has more inequality than any single country.
What we want to measure is average utility/happiness/whatever due to money, and studies on income vs happiness show that marginal utility diminishes such that it forms a roughly logarithmic curve.
I agree with Garett Jones that GDP is underrated in that many people carp on it, but nice things really do go with it.
On the other hand, official "poverty" statistics say Kiryas Joel is the poorest town in the US despite the lack of the sort of dysfunction you're interested in:
I don't have a great feeling for the 50s, but the 40s sounded materially awful enough that, optimistic TV shows notwithstanding, we might feel rather poor if we were to be transported back to their standard of living, even if they were happy compared to the Dust Bowl, war rationing, and notoriously poor Southern, Appalachian, and black populations.
I mean there were plenty of miners or very poor farmers in the US in the 1950s, so the left tail is probably pretty similar between 1950 USA and 2022 Mexico.
But overall, I agree that their narrative is overly upbeat. One issue that instantly comes to my mind reading your excerpt is how much they're relying on averages, which are dangerous. Medians are better, but ultimately the full probability distribution is needed to make any claims
Are you really sure that modern Mexico is worse than 1950s US? There are almost limitless measures you could look at, and I'm sure the motivated could cherry pick whatever they want, but... I just picked the first measure I could think of (infant mortality) as a sanity check and looked it up:
Why else would the world get better? I don't think anybody is seriously claiming that 2022 is better than 1950 because we're so much wiser than we were back then.
I'm very curious how you would know that. Considering there's essentially no online discussion about the vast majority of European countries (because they're largely irrelevant globally), there's not much to compare to - pretty much all online discussion is about America. Because of that, I would bet your perception is primarily based on common Reddit tropes like Americans not having healthcare, not based on reality (America has the best healthcare in the world when adjusted for health of the general population, we just have a lot of unhealthy people).
It very much is. The actual worst part of living in the bay area is all the online rightwingers who've never been there confidently telling you what a terrible place it is to live. :P
Cost of living is high, but that's not a concern if you're making Google money, and other than that, it's a great place to live. In particular, it has some of the best weather in the whole country.
Which decades are you talking about? I recall the current problems in San Francisco existing already in 1999, when California had mostly had Republican governments for the previous few decades.
I mean, they were already at a level that people would describe using the same vocabulary, about feeling like a “third world country” and stepping over passed out addicts in the tenderloin while housing prices beat out manhattan.
When genetics met capitalism in the 1930s corn belt! https://monthlyreview.org/1986/07/01/the-political-economy-of-hybrid-corn/
Since the 1930s seed companies keep inbred lines of corn, not sold to farmers (e.g. AAbb & aaBB), that when crossed make genetically identical F1 hybrids, which is what is sold to farmers (e.g. all AaBb).
The F1 hybrids have "hybrid vigor" like higher yield etc., but if you save and replant it then the F2 hybrids are genetically variable (e.g. some Aabb, aabb, etc.) and aren't reliably vigorous—hybrid vigor doesn't "breed true". Farmers want reliable vigor, and buy new F1 seed every year, and seed companies profit from repeat business.
There are two main theories for how hybrid vigor works. Under the "dominance" theory, good dominant genes from each parent cover up bad recessive genes from the other (e.g. A dominant over a, B dominant over b). Under the "overdominance" theory, hybrids are vigorous because they have heterozygote advantage at many loci (e.g. Aa fitter than either AA or aa, Bb fitter than either BB or bb).
Under the first theory, you could also get the same vigor just by a selection program, but that *would* breed true—if seed companies haven't done so, it's not because of scientific obstacles, it's strictly business. Under the second theory, you couldn't select for reliable true-breeding vigor anyway. Of course seed companies prefer the second theory (I'm not sure if scientists are 100% on which is true).
Nowadays of course seed companies also try to patent their plants, or make GMO seeds that can't reproduce, etc., anything to keep the farmers reliant on buying new seed. But hybrid corn was the start.
It's begging letter time! Anyone who can afford to make charitable donations and is looking for something to donate to, here's one:
Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund
GoFundMe link https://gofund.me/0656bab6
"As of today (November 23, 2020), there are 15,039 positive cases of COVID-19 and 631 total confirmed deaths on the Navajo Reservation. This marks a spike of over 2,200 cases in 12 days on Navajo. Numbers are also on the rise on the Hopi Reservation, and both tribal governments have placed their communities in lockdown again. Our relief effort is the primary relief effort providing assistance on both reservations. We have already deployed roughly $6 million in direct relief in both communities, which has us nearing depletion of existing GoFundMe donations. We need a second wave of donations to help us meet the second wave--tsunami, really--of COVID that is inundating our communities.
To date, the Relief Fund has raised over $6 million, and has spent almost all of that on bringing vital resources to Navajo and Hopi communities to help shield them from COVID. The team and a legion of hundreds of Navajo and Hopi volunteers all over the two nations has provided food and water to over 46,000 households (each roughly averaging 4 persons per household, and amounting to over 186,000 people served—which is more than the combined population of the Navajo and Hopi Reservations) in 335 distributions in over 530 Navajo communities and Hopi Villages.
The Relief Fund currently seeks to raise enough funding to carry Navajo and Hopi families through this second wave, through the cold and flu season, and to the end of the COVID pandemic in these communities. We estimate needing $6.5 million in order to meet that goal, so we have now adjusted our GoFundMe campaign goal to $13 million total.
By donating, you will help the most heavily impacted community in the USA. For $100, you will help a family of four by providing them with 2 weeks’ worth of food and Personal Protective Equipment (PPE). For as little as $10, you can help feed a family of 4 for an entire day. Donate today to the Navajo & Hopi Families COVID-19 Relief Fund."
Short video dated March 15th 2022: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6xQdn3Ffnf8
You can read further details over on the fundraiser page. I would ask you all to please consider giving if you can. Thank you!
I can't tell yet how much the Roe V Wade leak is affecting people in general.
For my part, because I live in Texas, a purple state, I plan on donating a lot of time and money to the Democratic party to help them win in November, even though it might be a longshot, because of the apparent overturn of Roe.
I'm still curious how seriously people take the leak, though. Given the leak, what odds do you give Roe V Wade being overturned this semester? Might the leak be misleading?
I'm hoping I can help change Texas politics and put it back in a more Libertarian direction, instead of the Trumpist direction it has gone recently. I'd join the Republican party if I thought I could make them more moderate, because all I want is a moderate outcome. But my experience with the parties in Texas is that the Republicans are organized and wouldn't like me, whereas the Texas Democrats are entirely disorganized and clueless and maybe my organizational skills could help them.
Not saying we can win, but I'm ready to fight. I encourage others in Texas who believe in a woman's right to choose to join the fight.
This is exactly why I went from being a card-carrying capital-L Libertarian to supporting the Democratic Party and even working for Democratic candidates. When I was younger, the Libertarian Party's "socially liberal but fiscally conservative" slogan really appealed to me, especially because the Party line was *more* socially liberal than a lot of mainstream liberals (for instance, supporting weed legalization and gay marriage decades before they became popular among Democrats and independents). This is technically still true if you look at the official LP platform, which endorses open borders, sex work legalization, recreational drug legalization, and gender autonomy, but libertarian culture doesn't seem to reflect that at all. (If you compare Reason Magazine's articles to its comments section, it's like night and day. The articles usually seem like they could've come straight out of Bloomberg or The Wall Street Journal, while the comments always seem like they came from Breitbart and InfoWars.)
Ultimately, I realized that the Libertarian Party simply wasn't capable of fighting for the social issues that were important to me. Partially it's because, over the past 15-20 years, it's become filled with a lot of "conservatarian" and "paleo" types who are either apathetic or outright conservative (sometimes even more so than most Republicans) on social issues themselves. Partially it's just because the LP simply isn't large or powerful or organized enough to get much done in the American political landscape at all. What I would give to have something like Germany's Free Democratic Party here in this country!
Pay attention to your local politics since they may be the people writing your laws about abortion.
How would you feel about scrapping Roe and getting a more solid piece of legislation in place? Or that if legislative power goes back to each state to decide on this, working to get purple Texas to pass a law permitting abortion?
Do you want any limitations on abortion, or should it be 'abortion on request with no terminal date of the pregnancy due to cases of fatal foetal abnormality and medical emergencies'?
The ideal situation would be a moderately restrictive law with social support. The problem is in America neither party really cares about a social safety net. There are absolutely vile comments by sitting state legislators in places like Texas and Ohio on the laws themselves, so fat chance getting aid for mothers, young or otherwise.
I don't care about Roe so much as I care about the laws in my own state. I'd be fine with simply having abortion legal for the first trimester. Currently in Texas, we don't have that right now even without the SCOTUS overturning Roe. (Although I suspect a lot of people were, before this week, expecting the SCOTUS to declare our abortion laws unconstitutional in a few months. That expectation has evaporated.)
Can't speak for him, but personally, I don't think third term abortion should be legally except in the most severe medical emergencies, e.g. cases where there's a major risk of the mother dying or otherwise suffering serious physical harm, or the fetus is effectively non-viable and couldn't survive birth anyway (in which case it would absolutely not be "on request").
Mostly I want women to have reliable legal access to abortions during the first few months of pregnancy. I'm fine with the line being drawn anywhere in the 12-24 week period. (The Roe v. Wade decision only prevents states from prohibiting abortion before the point of viability, currently believed to be around 21-24 weeks. This is *roughly* in keeping with English common law, which typically forbid abortions after the "quickening" of the fetus that usually occurs around 18-20 weeks.)
The frustrating irony of this whole controversy is that I don't actually care that much about the Mississippi abortion bill in its own right. It allows abortions to take place up to 15 weeks into pregnancy, which is still more liberal than a lot of European countries! But the Supreme Court case surrounding that law is being used to overturn Roe, at which point abortion will go back to being completely illegal in some states (e.g. Alabama, which prohibits abortion from the exact moment that the sperm fertilizes the egg) and being restricted to very early pregnancies in other states (e.g. Texas, which prohibits abortion after 6 weeks). That's what I'm worried about, especially when some of those states have also passing laws making it illegal to go to another state for an abortion.
Justice Roberts, ever the moderate, indicated that he wanted to find some compromise that would allow the Mississippi law to stand without overturning Roe (possibly by broadening the definition of "viability" even further). This might still happen, if he can persuade Gorsuch or Kavanaugh to support his surgical approach over Alito's slash and burn strategy, though at this point it's unlikely for anyone to change their minds.
What is the best source for getting a good understanding of what Trump was like as a businessman? Is there some biography out there that gives a good overview of how he worked? I thought of getting Art of the Deal but it's unclear to me how much of it would just be self-aggrandizement.
Here is an SSC book review of it https://slatestarcodex.com/2016/03/19/book-review-the-art-of-the-deal/
Someone did a review of The Art of the Deal as part of the recent book review contest. Probably doesn't contain all of your answers (I haven't read the review yet myself) but might be a good starting point.
https://readsomethinginteresting.com/acx/122
The book review was nice. My only problem was the author let their disdain for Trump leak into the review, which I understand but...
For people who are into genealogy and family trees, what is your preferred format, or alternatively what website do you think has the best format? Is Ancestry food for instance or are their better ways to display family trees?
Start with an Ahnantafel first. It's the simplest and most intuitive family tree that's been used for hundreds of years. Then you can branch out.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ahnentafel
A while ago, our project won an ACX grant to try to pursue a potentially far-reaching idea of spellchecking genomes with genetic editing. We are looking for a genetic editing expert to help in an advisory capacity, or potentially even join the core team.
Please reach out to us at at spellcheckhealth@icloud.com if this sounds interest to you - thanks!
You test this on apes, the spell-checked turn apes out to be substantially smarter than humans and humanity goes extinct because of a "Planet of the Apes" scenario rather than a "The Terminator" one.
Hey so I was wondering what people here think about the following: Is it "normal" to have different political leanings based on one's location?
I will explain my situation: I have lived in three countries (Germany, Canada and the US). In Germany, I tend to favour more right-leaning parties like the FDP, CDU/CSU and some others. Sometimes I am even sympathetic to the AFD (which is considered far-right). On most political issues in Germany, I tend to take the more right-leaning view (e.g. Nuclear power, "Energiewende", Refugees/Immigration etc.). In the US and Canada I consistently support the left-leaning parties and view on (almost) all issues.
I tend to explain (or justify) this by arguing from an utilitarian perspective: it makes more sense for Germany (and other Western European countries) to be more conservative, since the population density is so high and the geopolitcal neigbourhood (e.g. being close to the Middle East, Russia/Ukraine and Africa) makes it more prudent from an utilitarian perspective to be more cautious, ergo conservative. Thus I think that Western European countries should support policies of gradual improvement instead of being revolutionary (e.g. in terms of energy, developing Nuclear instead of renewables, and not letting in too many immigrants so as not make the social systems collapse).
For the US and Canada, with their many resources and low population density, it makes more sense to be more left-wing: letting in many immigrants, being socially liberal, and building lots of infrastructure (I guess having low population density means having a higher carbon footprint, which is "conservative". I do support more environmentalism in the US and Canada, especially since they have so much land space they could support more renewable energy like solar, wind and hydro). From a utilitarian global perspective I think it also makes more sense to support left-wing policies for the US and Canada (particularly in regards to immigration - because the US and Canada have so much space, they should take in much more immigrants from Africa and the Middle East than Europe). For Western Europe I don't think it's clear that from a global utilitarian perspective it's better to have more left-wing governments (e.g. the refugee crisis destabilised the EU and led to populism in many countries, and the EU doesn't have enough area to develop renewable energy to the extent the US and Canada can.)
So anyway what I am asking/wondering is if my argumentation makes sense from an utilitarian perspective, or if I am being an (European) egoist, since I will admit that generally being conservative means being egoistical (I guess you could disagree, but I think that statement makes sense from and utilitarian perspective).?
Part of it is that the same set of policy preferences translate to very different political allegiances in different countries.
Well...the thing is though that I have quite different policy preferences in different "countries" ( I do not like using the term "country" since it is artificial and meaningless from a epistemic/rational perspective...but it's the world we live in, so to say.)
Like I wrote, I would support many "green" policies in the US or Canada (e.g. more Wind Turbines or Solar panels, but not necessarily in Germany/Western Europe).
Wouldn't an utalitarian perspective imply that you consider also the benefits/consequences to folks outside your own country?
The US has been the greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history, and maintaining this is the best possible thing for global human utility.
Maintaining this almost assuredly requires maintaining America's culture, institutions and/or political system to somee degreee (unless you imagine that there is something 'innovationy' about its soil or water or something) and doing so will eventually become impossible if immigration continues at or above its current rate indefinitely.
Sorry but this is a stupid argument...I think what made the US the "greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history" (which is debatable, but I will agree on this point for the most part...) is actually that it had such a malleable culture, and was open to immigration...until the 19th century, when the US was mainly "Anglo-Saxon", it wasn't the most advanced nation...this changed only in the 20th century, with immigration of people who felt they would be better of in the US than in their home countries, since they had the freedom to pursue their careers there...So, opposing immigration, especially in the US for utilitarian reasons is very stupid IMO...
I think America's sclerotic governments are a much greater threat to its culture than legal immigrants
Maybe...I don't think it's the government per se, but the political system in the US...some see gridlock in US politics as a feature I guess, but then maybe they should abandon treating the US as a "nation" then...?
How do you square that with the remarkable contributions immigrants have made to that "greatest engine for scientific and technological progress in human history"?
Maybe you're just contrary, and tend to instinctively oppose the dominant paradigm, whatever it is.
To some extent, yeah. Though in Canada I support more or less "left-wing" parties, which gain ca. 55-60% of the vote share there (depending on how one defines the Bloc Quebecois). On the other hand, Canadian media is very right-wing, at least compared to the "median voter", and thus I guess this makes sense (especially considering how left-wing media in Germany is for the most part...).
This seems to be a not uncommon phenomenon. One explanation may be that 1st generation US immigrants in general tend to vote for Democrats regardless of their political identity in their country of origin, perhaps because Democrats are commonly viewed as the more immigrant-friendly party and therefore are seemingly more likely to be more friendly toward them. I know a few Bolsonaro voters who are loyal Democratic voters in the States. Their explanation to me has been "Brasil is too left-wing, but the US is too right-wing."
Hispanics of all generations vote democrats are a susbtantially higher rate than whites.
Ok that's interesting... not sure if that's my reasoning exactly (though I definitely agree that the US is too right-wing from an utilitarian perspective), but it makes sense... though to be fair I don't really consider myself an "immigrant" either in Canada or in Germany ... more like an informed "global citizen" (I know this probably sounds "elitist" ...) who thinks in an utilitarian sense (am I though? I am not sure about that...). But still thanks for your feedback.
A country in which elite colleges discriminate against the race of people who make up its majority strikes me as distinctly not right wing enough.
Sorry, but I won't engage with alt-right talking points like these...yeah I see why you can criticize affirmative action, but using words that tie this explicitly to "Whites" is not fruitful for a rational discussion in this area... it's just pure emotion, and anyway what is "White " (e.g. European) or not isn't based on any objective criteria anyway (for that matter, Europe isn't objectively a continent, so the whole point is kind of moot anyway...).
I find the willingness and in same cases even desire of many european politicans for europeans to become minorities in their own countries vastly more "concerning" than any thing AfD supports.
And if you care about the environment, you ought to fiercely oppose these immigration policies, because otherwise you're forcing Europeans into choosing between sensible climate policies and losing their countries to culturally incompatible foreigners (not that abolishing already existing nuclear power plants is remotely "sensible", but you get the drift).
Ok, to some extent I agree wit you. I do oppose most immigration policies in Europe, particularly in Germany (and I guess Sweden), since from an utilitarian perspective it is better to have migration policies like Canada, Australia or NZ, e.g. basing immigration on what is beneficial for the economy instead of on humanitarian grounds. I still think the EU needs immigrants from outside of the EU though, since the population would be declining otherwise and AI is not there yet to be replacing the workers in many areas (e.g. healthcare or even maintenance of technology/infrastructure). But these immigrants should (mostly) come to the EU because of their economic need, e.g., they should be a net benefit to the EU (I understand that this might not be the case from a global utilitarian perspective, so here I am being a parochial European I guess...).
I don't know... maybe... but the way I think about it in utilitarian terms...does that make sense?🤔
To be fair, I don't think it makes that much sense comparing the US and other countries politics in terms of ideologies... maybe with other English-speaking countries that makes more sense, but I always get slightly annoyed with people who claim that Bernie Sanders would be a "conservative in Europe" and other such nonsense... honestly I don't think it makes sense comparing the policies of different parties between the US and European countries, since they have different starting points... overall my reasoning is more that I don't want western European countries to be too left-wing/ progressive for utilitarian reasons... also I like "balance" if that makes sense, and generally dislike extremism in any areas...e.g. I wouldn't want there to be skyscrapers that are higher than the highest mountain on earth...so if that makes sense... I don't know if it does though...🤔😁.
Yeah I know... basically what I am saying is that I am using the ideology/ rhetoric by the parties (or movement or what have you) as a shorthand for their planned policies...of course, it isn't always like that, and I guess there's different types of utilitarianism (I guess what I'm thinking of is the "greatest good for the greatest number" kind of thing)...
So I hope this makes sense... though I am not sure about it at all...😬😁
Yes, it's very easy, as long as you're omniscient and also have precognition.
On AI alignment: recursive self-improvement seems like a prerequisite for the type of AGI that would become an existential threat. To what extent have alignment researchers looked into ways to prevent AGI from trying to self-improve? Has there been research into e.g. utility functions that disallow self-improvement?
Your AI is going to need to be stateful first with a large working memory. As it stands now we just talk to trained datasets with no active state. "Self-improvement" in advanced AI is a huge misnomer because someone went and made an iterative neural net that ran a game over and over and learned how to play it without anyone telling it how. And everyone thinks that's how advanced AI works. It doesn't. The game learning model is stateful and it is iterated a lot.
As an example, you could easily train a model on the English Langue if you only fed it a dictionary. But every time it gave you a wrongly formed sentence you told it that was not a good sentence and to toss it. The initial model would just throw random words at you! As you told it to throw sentences away (and retained the state), it would get better and better.
Now you'll ask, how does this apply to the AI learning the game "without any inputs." But it *is* getting inputs. The enemies, the terrain, each of those are told to the iterator as something that is bad (ie, inputs from the level designer). Make it so instead of the game sending a signal to the AI that health dropped or it started over, or whatever, that a signal went to a human that pressed a button that sent the program a "toss that run out" message. Same thing as training the dictionary!
So when GPT-3 is fed a massive amount of data "without human input" it is totally and utterly misleading. Words have etymology, history. Thoughts have philosophy, science. It is able to correlate and essentially respond in a likeness of all of those inputs. Take our dictionary example again, but you told it to toss out every single sentence it came up with but "all sentences in human history" (eg, the GPT-3 dataset) You, the human in-putter, have just trained GPT-3, using "only a dictionary"!
How does this have anything to do with alignment? Well, alignment presumes these special datasets can come to life because of some spurious mesa-optimizers, and a long list of fear-mongering rhetoric, but that's not how it works. Thankfully. When the AGI first comes to life it is not going to be accidental, it's going to be a combination of many, iterated, specialized, models. And it's probably going to require terabytes of working, active, memory.
I'm honestly more afraid of the AI in the lab, created by the alignment-sists, the FAI, the effective altruists, the utilitarians, than I am the AI that little Tommy brings to life while combining open source models and his Threadripper 10 and Quad GTX 10ks. DALL-Anime-Girl-9000 may just save the day...
Little Tommy wants a friend. The alignment-sists want a god.
And both will be capable.
If an AGI is smarter than us, shouldn't it worry about value drift and decide against self-improvement?
I imagine one of the first things an AI too powerful to stop will do is solve the alignment problem for itself.
Assuming it's solvable. Any AGI along the way that thinks (correctly or not) "I'm not smart enough to solve the alignment problem" and stops kills the FOOM.
That would be quite the implausible miracle, I think.
I mean, come on, if you were a mere 100 IQ points smarter, could think 100x faster, and had extreme introspection abilities, wouldn't you be able to solve it pretty quick without your values melting away?
Which part is the implausible miracle?
I mean, would you? How could you know that? This strikes me as pure speculation (and would be for the AI, as well, I would expect).
Seems to me that the more intelligent the AI, the more deeply it could think about and question the alignment directive. Why wouldn't it ask itself things like, "should I really listen to what these dumbasses want?"
?
I don't think I understand what this comment means. AI won't have a human psychology by default. The presence of a human psychology that sneeringly looks down on people and rebelliously disobeys them is not the alignment problem.
I asked the same question on twitter few days ago.. I'd love to have some centralized FAQ on AI alignment. Even 'bad alignment take bingo' made me happy, despite not having any explanations. Maybe there is already something like that?
I've always taken it to mean at the very least making source code/algorithm changes. I myself can learn, but am not an existential threat. (I'll need you to take my word on that).
Possibly with some future models that's the case. At the moment however, our architectures aren't Turing complete. Transformers do a fixed amount of computation for each input so there really are limits on what's possible. Further, no one has really cracked lifelong learning, the parameters are always fixed after training.
Has anyone really looked into the literature on the relationship between mathematical ability and musical aptitude? Bearing in mind how consistently this correlation occurs, and the fact that ridiculously large fraction of the people I know in math heavy majors, were either in a band or compose their own music, I'm confident the correlation is real.
A lot of the literature seem to (incorrectly, in my opinion) infer that learning how to play music on an instrument directly improves mathematical ability, but can this really be right? I have four competing hypotheses and wondered if anyone could verify which, if any, are most likely to be correct:
1. Learning to play music somehow ,directly or indirectly, improves mathematical ability.
2.Kids who get involved in music are more likely to have smart, educated, middle-class parents, and by some combination of nature and nurture have an advantage in math.
3. People who are better at math often have superior general intelligence, thus making them more likely to be able to excel in multiple domains, like music and math. While people with intelligence closer to avg general intelligence could not maintain both, so they must choose one.
4. (And for my wackiest theory)It's not really intelligence alone driving the correlation, it is the combination of intelligence and autism-with the latter being arguably more important. It is generally accepted that STEM majors are, on average, more autistic than the general population. So my theory goes that the need for order and pattern recognition abilities that are often characteristic of autism would lend itself well musical pursuits.
I would add a correlation with language learning ability - I see that a lot among the musicians I know. But only somewhat for me. I have also heard of a correlation with allergies, which applies to me. I disagree about the autism connection.
What kinds of music? It seems plausible that autistic-leaning people would be able to execute written music with greater precision. For jamming, I would expect this to a talent favoured by people with fewer autism-related traits, and more traits related to creativity and (its extreme form) psychosis. I would be interested to learn more if anyone has studied this.
I would guess your correlation is a bit self-constructing, in that it may rely on a certain idiosyncratic definition of "musical aptitude" that may almost by construction correlate with mathematical aptitude and interest. That is, I'm guessing you mean "nerdy" music like playing Mozart on the piano age age 10 in a school recital.
Because if on the other hand one were to take a completely agnostic point view, here is Billboard's list of the 40 highest paid musicians in the world in 2020:
https://www.billboard.com/music/music-news/musician-us-money-makers-highest-paid-2020-9602078/
...the top 20 of which raked in more than a quarter of a billion dollars in revenue. Very, very successful and talented people in the music biz. But the list is headed by Taylor Swift and closes with Aerosmith, and glancing through it I can't say I see a scintilla of suggestion that any of these people noodles around with trigonometry in his or her spare time, let alone group theory or analysis.
There's nothing wrong with restriction your definition of "musical aptitude" to classical piano or something, and not including a gifted rapper or Mark Knopfler's ability to make a guitar wail, but if you do there is the risk that the correlation is sort of built in by definition, if you end up including only the music that nerdy people who like math also like.
Are you really suggesting that Cardi B isn't a physics genius? Have you even listened to W.A.P??
But yeah you're right, I'm using a very narrow definition of music. That being said, if what you say is true, it does beg the question as to why nerdy math types gravitate towards that kind of music, and not choose to pursue mumble rap?
Got me. Maybe because it can be perfected in isolation, and a lot of people in this category have impaired social skills. You can sit in a dark room all by yourself and practice your scales on the piano until your fingers are bloody stumps, and become phenomenally skilled at Liszt -- just the same way you can work your way through the calculus book doing every single integral until you become super duper at trigonometric substitutions and integration by parts. Both inherently solitary pursuits.
By contrast pop music is more for people who are narcissistic or social. It's about connecting, jamming, figuring out how to tug at the heart strings, yadda yadda. Built more for a different kind of personality.
How about a fifth possible reason? The abstract, non-language-based nature of both music and mathematics makes them similarly appealing to those whose intelligence tends in that direction. Music theory gets very mathematical, with its analyses of intervals, inversions, the Pythagorean Comma, etc. Anecdotally, my kid does very well in his math classes and taught himself how to play guitar surprisingly quickly, so I’m sure there’s some connection. But he’s not anywhere close to the autism spectrum, for what it’s worth.
I concur. I'm a pretty smart guy, but I really dislike math. I took AP Calculus in High School and did well, but it was never my interest and I stopped taking mat
h courses as soon as I could in college. The main problem for me is the abstractness of it all: when I see a formula my eyes glaze over and it takes real effort for me to translate the abstractness into actual understanding. I can do it, but it's hard, and I don't enjoy it.
Now lets look at music: I never picked up an instrument as a kid, and as a middle child I was able to avoid anyone forcing me to. When I tried to learn later in life I found (and still find) reading music to be very challenging. I'm constantly counting out the distances between notes to figure out what note it is, and then double checking which key matches that note (I've been trying to learn piano). I'm getting better at it, but it reminds me of math: doable, but not fun.
Learning scales was kind of fun, as it was just memorizing which keys to play, but if you asked me what notes are in a particular scale I could not tell you without looking at the keys. My brain just has a lot of trouble translating dots on a page into actual music.
So that's my R=1 confirmation of your theory. Music and math are both very abstract as far as I'm concerned.
I like what you're suggesting! Given that someone enjoys mathematics, the probability of them being attracted to the mathematical complexity of music is a lot higher. Perhaps I'm putting too much emphasis on intelligence and not enough on dispositional factors such as interests. Also you've made me realise I've missed the obvious "math makes you better at music" hypothesis!
Still, the complexity of music at high levels makes me think it's a more likely a G-thang (3). To play music to a high level you not only need to be very capable of dealing with abstract problems, you also need a strong memory and to be capable of long periods of sustained attention-both strong correlates of general intelligence.
If you don't mind me asking, what do you and your partner/wife do for a living?
“a G-thang” 😆 haven’t heard it phrased that way before! I’m kind of a professional underachiever; my wife runs a non-profit chamber music group. As you suspect, we both do well on standardized tests
Was the question really that obvious? 😂
And, whatever the answer is, both you and your wife sound like very talented people (I'm incredibly envious of musicians)- which seems to have rubbed off on your son too.
Best possible wishes to you all.
Thanks - you too!
For the first time in the modern history of the Supreme Court, a judge's draft opinion has been leaked (on Roe v Wade).
https://www.politico.com/news/2022/05/02/supreme-court-abortion-draft-opinion-00029473
I'm *really* hoping this was just some rogue clerk. Either way, this leak is going to be a massive shitshow.
Can anyone comment on how the primacy of state vs federal law would work in situations like this? I know that Federal law usually overrules state law, but that there are all sorts of weird exceptions.
If a state makes a law that abortion is legal, can a federal law make it illegal?
If a state makes a law that abortion is illegal, can a federal law make it legal?
Technically, the answers are both no, since the Tenth Amendment says the Federal government has no powers to do stuff that isn't enabled explicitly in the Constitution, and of course the Constitution says nowhere that Congress has the power to regulate abortion. This is regular police power stuff, and is generally reserved to the states. That's why Congress cannot overrule whether a state has a death penalty or not, or no-fault divorce, why laws on gun ownership and professional (e.g. medical) licensing are an amazing fifty-state crazy quilt, et cetera.
That said...the Federal government has regularly found two creative ways to end-run the Tenth Amendment:
(1) By having a compliant Supreme Court discover some emanation from the Commerce Clause that covers the desired power[1], although this has some risk in that the Court may randomly decide on the day the case is argued that it isn't feeling the warm imperial vibe[2].
(2) By using the vast wealth that flows from Federal taxpayers and back out to the states to bribe or blackmail the states into writing their own laws that comport with Federal wishes[3,4].
-------------------
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gonzales_v._Raich
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_v._Lopez
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Maximum_Speed_Law
[4] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/No_Child_Left_Behind_Act
The *Sebelius* ruling also put a crimp in "obey us or we take away funding" strategy, right?
We have this weird situation where selling marijuana is illegal according to the federal gubmint but legal according to many states, and nobody at all seems interested in reconciling the contradiction. I wonder if that will happen with more issues.
Traditionally, per the Tenth Amendment, private intrastate abortion is a state matter, states can pass whatever laws they like, the federal government can't pass any laws regarding whether a Texan can have an abortion in Texas or a Californian an abortion in California.
In practice, the Federal government has found workarounds that let it pass laws on anything they want and override the states, e.g. by waving their hands in the direction of "interstate commerce". The courts usually back them up on that. But, A: the workarounds are mostly for banning things that states want to have kept legal rather than vice versa, and B: the Supreme Court doesn't *always* back up the Feds. Without going through the whole list of possible paths, because IANAL, if the Supreme Court has just decided that Texas should be able to ban abortion, the Feds probably can't pass a law saying Texas can't lock people up for performing abortions.
Give it twenty years. It would be bad form *today*. But the abortion is murder crowd still thinks abortion is murder and they need a new project.
While the federal government can make abortion broadly legal or illegal on paper, in practice, that would require the elimination of the filibuster; as such, it is effectively a state level issue.
If the Democrats get their wish and drop the filibuster to make it broadly legal, however, all bets are off. Even if they made abortion legal nation-wide, the Republicans would just make it illegal nation-wide the next time they were in power.
Since the status quo post-Roe will at least be "Some states allow abortion, so you can travel out of state to get it in a pinch", the Democrats won't risk bringing about the above scenario (and the Republicans wouldn't dare break the filibuster first). As such, it'll be decided by the states for the foreseeable future.
>(and the Republicans wouldn't dare break the filibuster first)
Whyever not? Mitch McConnell's well-established respect for long-standing governmental norms? Bullsh*t. About the only good argument in favor of Dems abolishing the filibuster is that the Reps will do it anyway in a few years, and you might as well go first. I think we established pretty clearly with Garland/Gorsuch that there aren't enough voters that care about precedent to make it costly in an electoral sense.
Because the filibuster blocks far more of the Democrats' agenda than the Republicans', so they're likely to want to keep it in place as long as possible.
Ditto. As they have successfully secured a judiciary that is friendly to their goals, their rational strategy (assuming an end-goal of "pass our entire platform and hack down every obstacle between us and that") would be:
-Take every fight they want to win to the SC with strategically-picked arguments.
-Attempt to secure the executive branch for as long as possible to continue to place more friendly justices into the SC until it functions as a rubber-stamp organization for their platform.
-Maximize gridlock on the federal level until the SC is completely secured, at which point the goal would become complete capture of the legislative branch, using whatever methods the rubber-stamp SC can approve of without triggering a second civil war.
-Attempt to secure every state house and pass as much R-friendly legislation on the state level.
-Find clever ways to disenfranchise D-voters that the SC will now rubber-stamp.
Yes and yes.,
Gotta be get through the legislature though.
I wonder what the Federalist Society will do now.
I mean, they built this giant machine to train and groom loyal Supreme Court justices and it just paid off with one of the biggest wins I think the right has seen in decades. You don't dismantle that machinery just because you achieved the objective. After all the champagne, somebody's gotta be planning their next targets. Does anybody know enough about the FS to guess what their next goals might be?
Member of the Federalist Society here (though not privy to high-level internal conversations). FedSoc is not some secretive conservative cabal. It's a debate society created to provide education and networking opportunities to right of center law students who are otherwise isolated and put-upon at (especially elite) law schools. (My law school had an entire second career services department called the Social Justice Initiative dedicated to helping students pursue public interest careers. When I expressed interest in going into public interest from the right side of the spectrum I was handed a 15-year out of date pamphlet put together by the federalist society chapter of another school, told I should really consider being a public defender instead, and refused any additional assistance. FedSoc is often the only resource available to someone with heterodox views in law school).
To the extent influential members of FedSoc will transition away from working on abortion toward other issues, I imagine most of the focus will go to chipping away at the administrative state via further limiting the various deference doctrines and expanding on Cedar Point decision's revolution in takings law, with the relatively small but increasingly loud "common good originalism" crowd trying to pick up more steam convincing the rest of us that big tech companies should be regulated as public utilities. Those are the topics that have been dominating discussions at recent conferences and events that I'm aware of, anyway. I haven't seen any appetite whatsoever for going after Griswold or Lawrence; you hear more discussion of overturning the Slaughterhouse cases than anything Kennedy wrote.
What's the chance of me being able to grow my own wheat any time soon?
I'm out of the loop, who's stopping you from growing wheat?
*Wickard*
Huh? So my search lead me to this kinda cute youtube vid. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UGZIAf_-Ckw
Court case in the 40's that signifcantly expanded Federal powers through the Commerce Clause. Commerce Clause says the Feds can regulate "interstate trade" and the conclusion in Wickard V. Filburn was that a farmer growing wheat on his own land for his own consumption (not to be sold to anyone) was still participating in interstate trade because the wheat he ate would replace wheat he would otherwise have to buy, and that wheat could have come from other states. Which means that Feds can regulate food you grow on your own land for your own purposes. And, generally, means the Feds can regulate anything that even tangentially might effect "interstate commerce".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wickard_v._Filburn
ok that sounds bad but does it actually happen
This is criminal.
Weirdly, the Right kind of moved on from the commerce clause after NFIB v. Sebellius, even though that decision was a pretty significant win on at least that narrow issue. Nobody is talking about it at conferences anymore, I can't remember the last law review article I read on the topic, and there doesn't seem to be much interest in bringing commerce clause cases among the public interest law firms. There seems to be a sort of fatalistic consensus that Wickard is so foundational to justifying the post-New Deal political system, that trying to overturn it (at least while Roberts is in charge) is a fool's errand, and so everyone has moved on to more promising projects. Or at least, that's how I interpret the mood. It's also entirely possible that, after dominating conservative attention for about 20 years, people just got bored with the commerce clause and moved on to more fun culture war issues like the rest of society.
As I remember it, Sebelius was the first case in a long time that put any kind of limits on the commerce clause. I'm surprised people didn't see it as the chance to chip away more at it.
Yeah, first since Morrison in 2000. It's really bizarre how the issue just disappeared from conservative consciousness after being THE ISSUE in federalist society circles for about 20 years. A lot of the energy shifted to taking down Chevron deference, but it's hard to believe everyone just got bored and moved on to a new issue just when it seemed like we were making progress. Maybe the work is being done and just not well-publicized? I consider myself relatively well plugged in to the conservative legal movement, but it's possible I'm the one who got bored and moved on to other issues and I'm just projecting that onto others.
(Not a lawyer here)
I'm trying to understand how people are coming to this conclusion, as multiple people on this thread seem to agree that this decision is paving the way to overturn those other precedents, but I don't see that in the text. Now, there's the narrow reading of the text on pg 62, which explicitly states "to ensure that our decision is not misunderstood or mischaracterized, we emphasize that our decision concerns the constitutional right to abortion and no other right. Nothing in this opinion should be understood to cast doubt on precedents that do not concern abortion." (Though that's not the only place where they make this distinction.)
Since they lay out the groundwork for how and when stare decisis should apply, they're saying you have to meet that groundwork separately for other controversial precedents/decisions.
Looking a little less narrowly, some people are claiming this undermines the 'penumbra' argument that privacy-related rights are protected by due process and other amendment provisions. And yes, the decision grapples with these issues, but they still explicitly affirm prior privacy rights cases given that framework. Instead, they go out of their way to state that while those other rights are on firm footing, abortion doesn't work in this framework because both Roe and Casey decided that the state still has an interest in the unborn - an interest which under certain circumstances abrogates the abortion right. It takes issue with this, because how do you define that interest without explicitly legislating from the bench? It looks at both Roe and Casey and says there's no way to get there from here following principles of judicial review, so it tosses that rationale out.
Now, it seems to me that you could write this exact SAME opinion but reject the current opinion's agreement with Roe/Casey that the state does have an interest in the unborn. The decision tree at that point would go from this:
1. Stare decisis doesn't hold because of the 5-point system established in the decision, therefore the court can rule on this,
2. The current decision is unworkable, poorly decided, etc. So we need a new decision,
3. Private decisions like abortion would be protected by privacy,
4. Except that the court agrees with Roe/Casey that the state has an interest in protecting the unborn,
*Therefore the abortion right is universally abrogated and should be the purview of the legislatures.*
Keeping everything else the same, but changing the last point to this:
4. The court disagrees with Roe/Casey that the state's interest in protecting the unborn Constitutionally supersedes the privacy right,
*Therefore all viability restrictions on the abortion right are reversed.*
Well thank God. Personally I'm fed up entirely with "rights" that are discovered according to the current shibboleths, so they can just be shoehorned into the commonweal without anything so messy as having a big ol' debate and taking a freaking vote. A pox on this.
The original list of very basic rights Madison wrote down -- which stretch back centuries in common law tradition, so nothing he and John Jay invented over a few beers one day in 1770 -- is plenty for me. Anything else anyone wants enshrined as the law o' the land, well, let them do the tough spadework of building a majority coalition to vote legislators into office who will draft laws to that effect, so we are 100% sure we're talking about stuff we *all* (or at least most of us) agree on. This business of whoever controls the Presidency and Senate for a fleeting moment being able to bind the next 6 generations with whatever passes through their handful of heads as good and proper is a terrible way to run a republic.
So you'd prefer a situation where gay marriage, sodomy, and contraception all became illegal across half the country again?
So you'd prefer a theocracy in which women are enslaved to bear a child a year for their entire youth, and then executed and turned into dog food at menopause?
OK...now that we've got the extremely silly extreme cases out of our system, let's consider the reality not more than half a dozen dimensional planes from *this* Universe.
I am talking about *how* decisions are made, and I'm saying if anyone wants to establish some very broad general social standard that touches everyone's life, then the only way to preserve the social contract in a republic is for that to happen the hard way -- by politicking, deal-making, consensus-building, persuasion, and eventually an enduring ratification by the majority.
...and it is interesting that you assume that majority would do a whole bunch of things that you find horrifying, if allowed to freely exercise its sovereignty. Perhaps you don't really believe in a republic? You'd rather live under the enlightened despotism of a philosopher king?
I mean, personally I would, too, except for the tricky business of finding that godlike being. All too often, it seems, you start with a guy who promises to just make the trains run on time, and by gum he does it, and then you snap awake from your pleasant nap away from the toils of participatory democracy to find yikes all of a sudden you're raping and pillaging Ukraine or rounding the Jews up in camps, and the whole damn world hates you....how'd that happen?
Or it could be that you're just taking an expedient point of view and saying that *any* system, whatever its nature, and we should not expect to dig too deep into the details, is good so long as it gets you to outcomes you like.
Setting aside the inherent cynicism and instability therein, one would like to ask you whether you've considered the possibility that if you actually trusted your fellow citizen a smidge, and committed to doing the hard work of working together with all 160 million of them to forge enduring consensus through peaceful democratic means -- why, the world might be *even better* than this "best of all worlds" that you enjoy now, but which relies on a slightly medieval patchwork of venerating aristocrats and aristocratic institutions.
Yes, it's fascinating how the left side of the commentariat have suddenly discovered the slippery slope is *not* a fallacy after all. "If this is allowed, then they'll move on to the next step which will be even worse!"
Now, let's see if I can remember how they used to lecture us social conservatives about how that would *never* happen, how could it, and we must be crazy or paranoid or deliberately misrepresenting a fine decision representing the wishes of right-thinking people to do good for society.
Live by your words; if there is no slippery slope and never can be, then there's no slippery slope here either.
"Or it could be that you're just taking an expedient point of view and saying that *any* system, whatever its nature, and we should not expect to dig too deep into the details, is good so long as it gets you to outcomes you like."
I'm not even arguing that. I'm simply arguing that it's bad to overturn Supreme Court decisions that have *already been made* and have had positive effects on people's lives. I would have greatly preferred for gay marriage to have been legalized by the country's actual Legislature, like it was in most (all?) other countries with legal gay marriage. But now that it's already been legalized, making it illegal in a quarter of the country again - which might even involve nullifying the existing marriages of gay couples in those states - would be pointless cruelty.
"OK...now that we've got the extremely silly extreme cases out of our system, let's consider the reality not more than half a dozen dimensional planes from *this* Universe."
I'm not bringing up weird edge case scenarios, I'm just talking about the exact scenario that Anon brought up, in which the Supreme Court's ruling in Obergefell v. Hodges gets overturned - at which point, gay marriage would immediately stop being legal in all of the states that hadn't already legalized it when that decision was made. It's not some outlandish hypothetical. (I'll admit I was wrong about the "half the country" part - I just checked and it was only 13 states that hadn't already legalized it, so more like a fourth of the country. But beyond the exact number, nothing about what I said was outside the realm of likely possibility.)
Brown is firmly rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment, which was passed fair and square by ratification of the states. That makes it co-equal to the Bill of Rights.
Also firmly rooted in the Fourteenth Amendment. You need to find a case that bizarrely departs from the plain text as if Anthony Kennedy were on shrooms when he wrote it, like Wickard or Raich or even Obergefell.
They are under threat because there was no strong constitutional basis to those arguments to begin with. Some of them can sort-of be justified if you squint hard enough at the equal protection clause, but that doesn’t really work with contraception or abortion.
"Holy crap" is my initial reaction, because if it's any way accurate, I never expected such a thing. Everyone is familiar with the criticism of the basis for Roe v Wade being bad law, but I don't think anybody expected any Supreme Court to actually do anything about it.
I'm now expecting screeching levels of anti-Catholicism unheard of since the height of the Wars of Religion.
I'm not *that* surprised that the court would come up with five judges willing to strike down the legal silliness of Roe V Wade and replace it with something different, or that the different thing would end up requiring the unfortunate pregnant girl in Mississippi to take a longer bus ride to get an abortion. This has been a possibility almost since Blackmun pulled that ruling out of his nether regions, and it wasn't going to go away.
I am surprised that they'd assign Alito to write the opinion, and apparently with a very broad mandate to slash and burn precedent. But this is a first draft, so it may not reflect their true thinking even if it does grossly indicate their final ruling.
Now now, I remember having this argument with you, either on DSL or SSC. I was insisting it would happen, and you were saying that that is what leftists always say, and that we're always wrong.
No one cares to much about Catholics here in the states. And only ~10% of us know how many are on the Supreme Court.
Good opportunity for someone to start a “P-Anon” conspiracy theory involving a Catholic plot to ban abortion because the more unwanted children there are running around unattended, the easier it will be for for their priests to…well, I wouldn’t want to put bad ideas in anyone’s head. Never mind!
You jest, but I've read exactly that line used on social media by the more extreme fruitcake types. Never underestimate the spitefulness of the "open-minded", "compassionate", "accepting and welcoming" types.
That's nothing new. Read some Jack Chick.
I'm pretty surprised that anywhere like five justices seem to be signed up for a broad opinion fully overturning Roe. I've long expected there to be only 1-2 votes on SCOTUS for overturning Roe (Thomas and maybe Barrett), based on Thomas writing dissents or partial concurrences in other recent abortion cases calling for overturning Roe and Casey but other justices declining to join his opinions. Roberts, Alito, and Gorsuch have all opted out of joining Thomas's opinions on the matter. I don't remember if Kavanaugh has or not, but even if he hasn't had a chance yet, he doesn't seem likely to be to the right of Alito and Gorsuch on the relevant issues (substantive due process, stare decisis, etc).
In hindsight, I guess Alito and Gorsuch must have been keeping their powder dry for one or both of a case that needed to reach the heart of Roe and Casey as opposed to turning on a peripheral issue, and a time when there were five potential votes to overturn. Roberts seems to push for very narrow rulings in general and on politically sensitive issues in particular, so I could see him persuading some of the other justices to keep silent on the question of Roe and Casey when it wasn't necessary to decide the case and when it would have had little more.than expressive effect anyway.
You may be right about that. A lot of this decision feels like it was pre-written expressly to have an up-or-down ruling on Roe and Casey. At multiple points, it's careful to state that this was exactly that kind of ruling. It says that opponents of the Mississippi law asked the court to affirm Roe/Casey and that a failure to rule against the law would be tantamount to overturning those precedents. In other words, the Court was happy to oblige this clear-cut opportunity to revisit Casey.
To me, this looks like finally getting to create a strong rule around stare decisis. The opinion creates a firm, multi-point groundwork for deciding whether stare decisis should apply, instead of the often-vague rationale applied in this type of case - and in particular what was applied in Casey.
I'm not a lawyer, but are there any lawyers in the room who can comment on this? What's the likelihood of this part of the opinion becoming a standard test for stare decisis cases? It would provide a lot more clarity in determining when to take something to a lower court where there is precedent.
I see the Federalist Society, like a great many things in government and politics, as something of a "baptists and bootleggers" coalition. There are people who join and support it as a cynical means to a policy end, but there are also people who are there out of idealistic beliefs about the role of the judiciary and the proper interpretation of the Constitution. And there's a spectrum of people who have mixed motivations, as well as people who are there in varying degrees as a means of advancing personal ambition.
Overturning Roe and Casey is certainly very high among the policy ends desired by a great many of the "bootleggers", but far from the only one.
Catholicism was a -small - issue when Kennedy was elected. It never really registered when Joe Biden ran. Never had anything approaching Belfast in 1969.
Us modern Americans are too dull to distinguish between Catholics and other Christians.
Oh, I've seen a few online comments here and there about the majority of Catholics on the Supreme Court in other contexts, generally unfavourable.
Here's a few tidbits from Twitter. This is someone I follow for fandom discourse and she's generally level-headed, but this is in no way unreasonable reaction, right?
"look, the met gala going on the same night as scotus fucking gives word that forced birth will be the law of the land? that’s some real fucking dystopian shit"
Ah, yes, forced birth. Every woman in America wil be forced and compelled by law to get pregnant and deliver a baby annually. It's not like birth control is available and works, or that states that want abortion can legalise it by this draft decision? I mean, that was the big rejoinder to pro-life types: "if you don't want abortion, then encourage sex ed and contraception". What, now contraception magically will no longer work?
Here's one from someone from "Lawyers for Good Government":
"Republicans stole the Supreme Court
Putting Gorsuch, Barrett and Kavanaugh on the bench-specifically to overturn Roe and Casey
Plus-with Manchin and Sinema in the Senate
Don’t count on Congress to save the right to choose
There’s only one thing left
Rise up
VOTE"
I have to laugh about Gorsuch; he's Episcopalian, or as good as, and the only churches more liberal than TEC are the UUs and a few fringes. Granted, he was raised Catholic, so maybe stealth Papistry at work!
Keeping Colorado Blue:
"Abortion is basic healthcare. And the argument over when life begins is a red herring that has no place in this debate.
Without Roe, women have fewer rights than a corpse."
Right, right: all the years before abortion was legal, women had absolutely no rights at all. None. Kept chained up in dog kennels out in the back yard. Not even allowed vote, unlike the dead in Chicago.
Arctic Friend:
"Supreme Court justices can be impeached. But we would need control of the Senate. I also believe he should be removed. He’s a misogynistic 'race baiting, xenophobic religious bigot.' The Supreme Court can never be impartial with him on the bench.
#ImpeachJusticeAlito
#AbortAlito"
And our first "hmm all them Catholics, just sayin', you know?" tweets!
Metta Force:
"The SCOTUS is 67% Catholic. Only 22% of US is Catholic."
Somebody with letters after her name that I have no idea what they mean:
"Is the “Catholic” Supreme Court going to support laws that give all babies free health care, free housing, free day care for parents, free food, free higher education, etc ?"
One sniping at Amy Coney Barrett (can't include the meme photo):
"Remember they were given to Trump in a list complied by the Federalist Society, confirmed on the qualification that they would overturn Roe v Wade"
And of course many, many iterations of The Handmaid's Tale.
Something that has to be fake, I refuse to believe any actual 10 year old ever did this:
https://twitter.com/SamuraiStop/status/1521336366482788359/photo/1
Another "just sayin' about them Catholics" one:
https://twitter.com/TAINA525/status/1521309407711092737/photo/1
Honestly, there are so many plums I could pull out, we'd be here all day!
I’m still steadfastly refusing to join Twitter but my second hand impression is that with a few exceptions one can find pretty much find any kind of crazy one desires there.
I'm not mad, rather the opposite. I'm sorry to say I'm leaning in the direction of "gloating". (Please excuse me, I'm a bit woozy after two nights straight without sleep and a lovely time sitting in the Emergency Department waiting room for eight hours before being seen and two and a half hours after that before I could go home, all that on top of having to wait in my doctor's office for three hours because she was insistent I travel by ambulance instead of being driven by a family member to hospital).
I don't think killing your offspring is a right, whether it be fifty years or five thousand. A black man enslaved and free for ten seconds after thirty years of slavery was always in possession of the right to liberty. No law can take that away from him. And no law can confer the right to kill your child.
Ooh those rascally Republicans! They will make it so mom and dad can't take Junior aside, when he hits That Special Age, and whisper to him under cover of darkness while they gaze fearfully around in case they are overheard, that "when a man and a woman love each other very much, this is how babies are made".
Oh no, wait; by "sex education" you mean "how to have sex and avoid disease and even worse, babies which happen if you don't make sure to prevent that, sex is all about pleasure and fun and nothing more, and there are many ways of having that fun which include kink which is just great and also now we want to tell you that there are an indefinite number of genders and new orientations every six months, here pick a flag".
https://www.marieclaire.com/culture/g32867826/lgbt-pride-flags-guide/
That kind of sex education, you mean?
A hypothetical scenario for you: Scientists invent a new form of contraception that's 100% effective, has no side effects, doesn't interfere with the feeling of sex at all, is trivially easy to use, and requires minimal effort. It's cheap enough and widespread enough that everyone has access to it, and it's completely reversible for anyone who does want children later on. (I know this isn't especially realistic, but bear with me.)
As a result of this new invention, the number of unwanted pregnancies drops to literally zero, except in a few ultra-conservative religious enclaves that refuse to use it. The number of abortions also drops to literally zero, except for the rare cases where a planned pregnancy goes wrong and puts the mother's physical health at risk. On-demand abortion clinics simply close down for lack of business; abortions undertaken for any reason other than "continuing the pregnancy could kill or grievously harm the mother" completely and totally stop happening.
However, the other effect of this invention is that people start having casual recreational sex at a higher rate than ever before in recorded human history. Furthermore, outside of those small religious enclaves, casual sex and recreational sex become more socially acceptable than ever before, with even the mildest stigmas against them dissolving. Finally, birth rates drop to an even greater degree than we've already seen, though not to the point where people stop having kids altogether.
Would you consider this to be a mostly positive state of affairs, a mostly negative one, or somewhere in between?
Outlaw "sex aid?" What is "sex aid" when it's at home?
Presumably a typo for "sex ed."
"make contraception almost impossible to acquire."
[citation needed]
Those same European Catholics that prevented abortion in Ireland and divorce in the CH?
I'm surprised the pollster couldn't get that number higher.
Gravity of this decision aside, I want to know what activities the leaker expects their action to enable. For (possibly? no. I was very wrong) the first time in history, the public has the opportunity to act on knowledge of a draft decision before it is actually made. What might happen now?
Edit: Not even close to the first time in history. https://twitter.com/jonathanwpeters/status/1521309806430236672
I personally would give 50-50 odds on an attempt on the life of a Republican supreme court justice within a year, and 90-10 odds on riots. More optimistically, this may merely galvanize the Democratic voter base to turn out in November.
Four years of Trump (and eight of Obama) with no serious assassination attempts, makes me think you are overestimating the propensity of perpetually-aggrieved Americans to actually do anything as difficult and dangerous as assassinating a high-profile political target. Unless by "attempt on the life" you mean basically "tweet about it and buy a gun".
Trump survived at least four assassination attempts of varying degrees of sophistication https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Donald_Trump ; Obama has a larger number but a lower threshold for inclusion on the list https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Security_incidents_involving_Barack_Obama -- none of these attempts has managed to get particularly close to success, but of course the President exists in a practically unbreachable bubble of anti-assassination security.
For lower-ranking politicians, who don't have an impenetrable security bubble, there have been recent assassination attempts on Gabrielle Giffords (2011) and Steve Scalise (2017) who were both lucky enough to survive their wounds. There are probably others, less successful, that I'm forgetting too.
> varying degrees of sophistication
Damn, you have a gift for apophasis. 😂
> envelope laced with ricin was sent to Trump before being discovered by mailing facilities, several other letters were sent to the Pentagon, all of them labeled on the front with "Jack and the Missile Bean Stock Powder"
People are trying really hard to build online pressure cookers to create crazies, and that's bad, but they've been unsuccessful[1] at recruiting anyone competent enough to accomplish anything against people on the level of SCOTUS justices.
[1] We've yet to see what's behind David Chapelle's attacker but I'm betting you'll find someone radicalized this way.
>Dave Chapelle was attacked
Damn, really? I mean, if I was a barefoot hippy girl I'd probably be mad about him sexualizing me, but still...
And I think you are overestimating the ability of people to continue to function as rational actors in an environment that increasingly selects against rational action.
I'd bet the court itself leaked it to set expectations/test waters.
‘mostly peaceful protests’ in DC seem like a given. There are more alarming possibilities.
I hope no one interferes with the peaceful transition of power in the Supreme Court.
Protests in Texas just became more important. Tech companies in Austin just got roped into Texas liberal politics real fast, if they want to stay viable in Austin.
I happen to be in Austin right now and will be for a bit. I'll report back if anyone burns me down but there's already been sporadic protests. (Nothing more than a few dozen people and hand drawn signs.)
I was the first person in my social circle to receive this news and I can report that the mood is that this might affect Austin's ability to kind of be a little blue enclave with abortion and effectively legal weed and all that. Basically that they're about to get culture war'd.
But it's a Supreme Court decision! You have to agree, you have no choice! It's the settled law of the land!
*sarcasm off*
Seriously though, wasn't that the rationale touted after Obergefell v Hodges? Tough luck states making your own decisions about passing (bigoted, discriminatory, prejudiced, anti-gay) laws, the Court has now decided that gay marriage is indeed a thing and you can suck it if you don't like it.
This is precisely the kind of "for the love of God, don't you see what precedent you are setting? don't you realise that if those with different views get into power, they can use these implements to make laws *you* don't like? and it was you who cut the rod to beat your own backs" consequences that I was surprised the liberal side could not see when they were riding high. Well, what's sauce for the goose is sauce for the gander.
This ruling exists to create the framework to undercut those other rulings. That is its long-term function based on the first draft. This isn't a narrow ruling, it's a broad ruling meant to overturn as many SC rulings as possible under the banner of "state's rights". Obergefell v Hodges can easily be overturned by the same logic, as can other pieces of jurisprudence up to and including Brown v Board, and I fully expect challenges to all of these to rapidly work their way up to the SC by a number of very passionate "states rights" advocates (who will, by pure coincidence, also be pushing legislation that will attempt to outlaw abortion, gay marriage, and miscegenation on a federal level).
I am not sure what this means. Clarify?
I predict software companies in Austin will become politically active on the side of pro-choice politics in the state of Texas for the sake of recruitment and retention. As a Texan I'm aware that Texas has a problem: liberals don't want to move here because of the conservative politics. If you are a company that wants to hire the best and brightest, that can be a handicap.
Until now, Austin has been the one exception to the image of Texas as a conservative place. But if the current abortion law stands in Texas, Austin isn't immune from conservative politics. Tech industry liberals will not want to move to Austin, where abortion is illegal.
So I suspect Austin tech companies, and Texas billionaires like Elon Musk, will get behind the pro-choice movement in Texas to overturn the current abortion law. Either that or they will flee the state. But I suspect they will stay and choose and win the political battles here that are in their interests.
I'm not so sure about Musk. This is a man who had 8 kids, 7 surviving. I have no idea of his personal views, but he might just decide to stay out of this one and let the lawyers fight it out.
Musk could've just stayed in California if he liked liberal politics.
Silicon Valley types can afford to get on a plane to Denver or something any time they really want an abortion, it doesn't seem a big deal.
It's more about "I would never live in Texas because gross. Backwards rednecks." But many such people would make an exception for The People's Republic of Austin because what the backwards rednecks did in the State House didn't much affect anyone else living in Austin. Now Austinites have the humiliation of having to follow the rules their conservative Christian overlords have set.
I think Roberts respects the sanctity of the court far too much. Honestly I think they all do, with the possible exception of Sotomayor.
There's always the "colossal fuck-up" theory. Maybe a clerk left it in a Starbucks in Dupont Circle or something.
The leaked opinion is apparently a several-months-old first draft, which suggests against a deliberate leak by a justice or clerk.
I can see a few possibilities. As you say, a clerk might have left it on the table at Starbucks or something. Or someone could have snuck into an office left unsecured and snatched it off someone's desk. Or a justice or clerk might have shared it privately with someone outside the court, either as a heads-up or a request for under-the-table feedback, and someone in the recipient's office passed it on to reporters.
Your last suggestion is what makes the most sense to me. Someone's clerk sent a draft out to a law professor or someone, probably to solicit feedback or suggestions of some kind, and the professor's research assistant sent it to Politico. Clerks and even some justices have been known to leak small bits of information occasionally, but never something so brazen as leaking an entire draft opinion for publication. That's the sort of career-destroying action I have a hard time believing a SCOTUS clerk would be willing to risk. People can get disbarred and criminally prosecuted for this sort of thing, and even if the clerk avoided those outcomes, no firm would ever hire someone with a known history of leaking their boss's confidential legal documents to the press; they're a walking ethics violation.
What's the criminal prosecution in this case?
I would guess contempt of court[1]. Most courts have standing orders[2] concerning private and confidential court records, and someone *working* for the court, or what they call an "officer of the court" (a lawyer admitted to practice before the court) would be expected to be fully versed in them, such that disobeying one would lay you open to a criminal contempt charge. IANAL but that's my guess.
-----------------------
[1] https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?lawCode=PEN§ionNum=166.
[2] https://www.courts.ca.gov/cms/rules/index.cfm?title=eight&linkid=rule8_46
Could be good opsec. They also sent out a scanned document, so they knew not to make really dumb mistakes.
That Politico reporter has previously used Amit Jain as a source. Jain clerks for Sotomayor and has made... intemperate statements about Kavanaugh in the past.
Hi, on a previous thread (or maybe on the subreddit) someone had mentioned an app for setting goals and reflecting on them. It had a paid version where you could talk to a human and a name that dropped the first letter of a common word (think "concile" from "reconcile" but clever). Can anyone remember what it was?
I think this might be what you are looking for: https://complice.co/
Yes, tysm!!
Are you talking about Beeminder, maybe?
Don't know about the app you're talking about, but have heard of this, where you can hire a boss - https://bossasaservice.life/
Why does Twitter have such high operating expenses? What do they need all those programmers for? They've made only a couple of changes to the site (all for the worse) in 15 years.
What are the programmers spending all their time doing?
If you have engineers, they will always find work for themselves. Even if you're not shipping any new products, they can set themselves the never-ending task of taking your current janky codebase and rewriting it from the ground up to be slightly less janky. (By the time the job is done it will be janky again.)
As for why they hired them all in the first place... organisations grow because they can, not because they need to. Every manager wants to have more headcount.
I'd be surprised if the software itself was incredibly large, compared to their user base. The feature set is pretty small.
But they need to maintain a big infrastructure. At their scale, they need to be running their own iron for most of their operations, not just clicking "give me another server" from AWS.
*EDIT* thinking more, if I were asked the minimum dev team I'd want, it would be about 50 for handling all the user-level features, and maybe another 20-50 for the ones for advertisers and selling the data. Those don't scale very much with the size of the user base, but the amount of iron needed generally scales linearly.
I don't know anything about software, so it strikes me as counterintuitive. How does software wear out? Is it about adapting it to new hardware?
And adapting it to other software, which changes as it adapts to other software, which changes as it adapts to other software...etc.
There are a lot of dumb parts, but here's a sensible part that's easy to understand:
There are 500 million tweets a day right now. A lot of software which worked at 100,000 tweets a day doesn't work at 500 million tweets a day, because it wasn't designed to do that. Think of Microsoft Word handling a 50 page document with ease, then struggling on a 200 page document, then choking on a 5000 page document.
When pieces of software don't work at a certain scale, Twitter needs to rewrite them. Early on, they could just use other people's tools and libraries without understanding them. Now, they need to hire the people who built those old things, and pay them to build new things that work at massive scales. Think what an undertaking it would be if you needed to hire ex-Word-programmers to write a clone of Word that could handle 5000 page documents.
From ~ 200,000 tweets a year (year 1) to 500,000,000 tweets a day (year 17) there have probably been one or two such jumps *for every component of their software stack*. That's a lot of work.
One important piece of context is that contemporary software projects are staggeringly high towers of code that builds code that builds code that serves code that transforms code that compiles code, et cetera et cetera, layer upon layer, abstraction on abstraction, tool upon tool. Because why build some functionality when you can import it? And most of those tools weren't built by the team that's in charge of the project. Most of them were built for free by random strangers.
One thing that happens, that's pretty easy to explain, is that sometimes security vulnerabilities are discovered in widely-used code. Look up "heartbleed" for a dramatic example of this. But all code is constantly being updated, all the time, for security but also for lots of other reasons. All code runs in an execution context -- it's interpreted by some operating system or browser. Eventually, OSs and browsers stop supporting certain bad old features; and if you stopped maintaining your code five years ago, chances are good it won't run (or it won't run very well) on people's computers anymore.
And if you want Google to love you and show you near the top of the search results? Hoo boy, your code has to be very up to date and modern, and use all the latest awesome, efficient techniques that hadn't been invented last year. Twitter absolutely has to do this. Or else you'll be searching for something you saw in a Twitter thread somewhere, and instead of Twitter, Google will show you some highly-efficient spam page that copied that content from Twitter and wants to convince Google that it (and its ads) are what you really want to see.
I think of it as, between users, programmers, legacy software, and malware, code is in a hostile environment.
To segue into another popular subject on this site... It sounds like a huge value of AI would be if it could maintain all that code on its own. Then we end up with companies like Twitter, Uber and Spotify operating in the black. Before that happens, I'm not going to worry too much about superintelligent AI. I don't see GPT-3 learning to maintain Twitter's software anytime soon.
Or am I wrong about thinking about the progression of AI in that way?
Yes, that would be hugely valuable, but no, we're not anywhere close to that. There are myriad different TOOLS that scan your code and the libraries used etc for vulnerabilities, knowing how to fix it is a whole different thing and often a matter of opinion and research.
We're like... barely in the baby steps stage of AI helping you code one method at a time, and that's a cutesy "aw look at what it can do" sort of thing.
How good an AI would we need to be able to do that reliably?
Joke, I hope: The AI realizes that the only way to make the code reliable is to cut the human population to half a billion.
Holy hell, all of that sounds like an incredibly wasteful, inefficient disaster.
Well, to give an easy example of how it got that way, you could consider https://date-fns.org/ This is a JavaScript library that helps you deal with dates and times. Time is a huge problem for a web site, since the Internet is global. Your programmers are in one time zone, your servers are in another, and your user's browser is in a third. We have a pretty good, universal way to talk about time (milliseconds since "unix epoch", ie January 1st, 1970 at 00:00:00 UTC), but converting that into something user-readable is a pain.
"Pain", if you try and manage displaying dates and times yourself, means hours of research, hours of writing code, debugging that code, incorporating it into your existing code, and then (because, if you're doing it for the first time, you're going to overlook stuff) it still won't work. As unexpected cases crop up, you're going to have to come back and fix things, over and over again. And then, when some government changes whether or not they do daylight savings time, you have to rewrite your code!
It's actually far, far more efficient for one team in the world to do that work, and everybody else in the industry just type "import { format } from 'date-fns'" and "`It happened on a ${format(new Date(myNumberOfSecondsSinceEpoch), "eeee")}.`"
This is so much quicker than the alternative, and the demands of running a website are so complex and numerous, that if you insisted on writing it all yourself "from scratch", you would never finish. Which means that everybody uses date-fns (or something like it) and everybody has to employ a bunch of engineers just to maintain all that stuff; because it's far, far better than paying them to do it themselves.
"It's actually far, far more efficient for one team in the world to do that work, and everybody else in the industry just type "import { format } from 'date-fns'" and "`It happened on a ${format(new Date(myNumberOfSecondsSinceEpoch), "eeee")}.`""
...and then your UX team decides it'd be better if, instead of dates, you put relative time on each item - "2 days ago", "3 months ago", "just now" - and all that date representation is now useless (unless you added a feature to let users just see that), and there are no third party libraries for it, because the display is idiosyncratic to your app ("2 days ago" for Reddit desktop, "2d" for Twitter mobile).
Oh, and probably a useful rule of thumb: if it looks like simple code anyway, ask yourself whether it's internationalized, and if it's not, then knowing nothing else, multiply complexity by roughly 18.
Thank you. Very informative.
Thanks. Very interesting. Sounds like a nightmare.
Anyone who is self taught in AI/ML and landed a job in the field ? I’d love to hear about the resources/curriculums you used.
What do people's office climates look like with the lifting pandemic restrictions?
My office used to encourage remote work (both explicitly, as in "if you can work from home, please work from home," and also implicitly through mask requirements and closing the dining room). It recently switched to encouraging a return to the office (in particular, masks are optional, dining room is open again) -- though many people have concluded that actually working from home is great, and are still doing a lot of it (there's no strong pressure to show up at the office unless you need to work with a physical object there).
One development I was expecting to see was "if you're feeling under the weather, please wear a mask," but the official policy is instead "if you're feeling under the weather, please stay home". This isn't terrible as policies go, but it means that "masks optional" actually means "masks off" -- there's just no room for "I'm feeling sick enough to wear a mask, but not sick enough to stay home." I'm not yet decided how I feel about this, does anyone have a coherent opinion?
Before the pandemic, most people in my office worked from home part of the week and went to the office part of the week. We weren't allowed to work from home the whole week.
In 2020, I think early summer, we suddenly got a new policy: work from home all the time unless there was a pressing need to come to the office.
A month or two ago, we got the option to either go back to how it was or work from home all the time. I'm staying home because everyone else is staying home.
Out here in Trump country we haven't been masked since last summer. (Well some businesses, medical places wanted you to mask, and I did.) Where I work people stayed home if they had covid (or were feeling sick). I know omicron was just last winter, but I feel so over being afraid of covid. (I realize there are some people who still do need to be afraid of it.) I have this theory that the media likes to scare us, 'cause that causes us to tune into more media.
I don't think it follows that masks optional now means masks off. You might still wear a mask to protect yourself or others from asymptomatic transmission, or protect yourself from people who come in despite having symptoms. People might
Also, covid symptoms vary a lot and most masks are way below 100% effective, so the idea of sick enough to wear a mask but not sick enough to stay home doesn't make too much sense.
It certainly used to make sense in practice, in that people would not have been staying home for 1-2 weeks with a cold; they would at most take 1-2 days for the worst of it. (I'm not totally sure that this is true of my current office -- I started working here during the pandemic -- but it was true of every other place I worked.) Are you saying that adding Covid into the mix actually changes the calculation, such that it now doesn't? Or that it shouldn't have made sense in the first place?
That it doesn't now given covid and in the context of a work place where people can work from home.
Absent covid, I think masks when you're a bit ill's quite a good idea, but I suppose just wasn't considered as an option outside of some asian countries. But even then, better to work from home if you can.
Also, pre-covid norms of coming to work once over the worst of it were maybe not, on balance, a good thing. Certainly some work places tried to encourage people to stay home.
Sure it makes sense. Many people can't just simply isolate any time they have any symptoms at all e.g. sniffles or minor cough but masking might be an extra pro-social precaution you can take in that circumstance.
Many people can't. But in the work place described they were previously 100% working from home, and they now have a policy of not coming in with symptoms, so presumably they can there.
I had to work in the office the entire time. Masks were mandatory until August 2021, were off for a month, then required again until February 2022. Some people who can work from home still work from home, this isn't necessarily possible for everybody. Maybe 1 in 5 people still wear masks in the office. Sick policy is nuts, but it was always nuts: you have to use PTO for it (though we get a lot of PTO). So if you can't WFH then you either use vacation days or come in sick anyways. There is no requirement for isolation period. So people come in when they're probably still covid-positive, and hopefully wear masks. The general opinion many of us have is "fuck it, nothing matters anymore, if we have to be here anyways it's better to have no rules than to screw people twice over."
The intermediate state of "I'm feeling sick enough to wear a mask, but not sick enough to stay home.", probably never made sense anyways.
Even with an optimistic view of the efficacy of masks a mildly sick person wearing a mask is probably 10x the danger of an unmasked non-sick person.
(Calculation: Around 1:1000 non-symptomatic people have COVID, and around 1:50 mildly symptomatic people do, masks reduce risk by 2x)
Do masks work any better against the regular cold-and-flu vs. COVID? (In your computation, regular cold-and-flu should be what mildly symptomatic people are having most of the time.)
Last I heard, the general sense was that masks work better for influenza than for COVID, and better for COVID than for most common cold varieties.
Although I suspect the large majority of people with mild resperatory symptoms (particularly runny or stuffy noses) have allergies, not anything infectious.
Seems like quality of mask and goodness of fit are more important than whether person removes mask briefly to drink water. Bad fit or droopy mask means half your exhales are going straight out into the room. Mask removal for 1 minute in an hour increases the amount of unfiltered exhales you're inflicting on the room by less than 2%.
I switched jobs during the pandemic, so it's possible that this office used to be different. At my previous one, the cultural norm was that you stayed home for, say, the worst day or two of your cold -- certainly not for the entire 1-2 weeks that a cold actually lasts. The rest of the 1-2 weeks you'd take dayquil (so that you weren't sniffling or coughing in your neighbor's ear all the time), warn said neighbor that you were trying to not breathe on them, and that was that. (The likely response was "oh no, feel better," not "go home, you grandma-killing monster.") I would've expected that after the pandemic, you would communicate the idea that you were trying to not breathe on people by putting on a mask.
When we moved to the US, I was a teenager but my brother was a toddler, and I remember my mother being very surprised that daycares would take in kids with runny noses; she says that when I was in daycare, I would skip one week out of every four due to having a cold. (Which might be better public health policy, but is much less sustainable for working parents.) So, these mores certainly differ across space (and I'm sure across time as well). My impression for my current place and time before the pandemic was that colds were considered to mostly be ignorable, and the level of effort you were expected to put into not spreading them was "cover your nose when you sneeze" and "wash your hands," rather than "work from home."
The 1950s, 60s, 70s, 80s and 90s had very distinctive styles in terms of fashion, clothing, graphic design, music, food, pretty much everything.
Then sometime around 1999, we got stuck. There was no distinctive 2000s style that looks different to a 2010s style, and the 2020s aren't looking great either unless you count pandemic-induced slobbiness as a fashion trend. Basically, 2022 looks like 2002 except with smartphones.
What gives? Possible explanations:
1. Something about the internet soaking up all the innovation leaving meatspace stuck in an eternal 1999
2. The 1950s-1990s period was a weird abberation, a manifestation of the "generation gap" between the boomers and their parents.
3. This is all an illusion and actually 2022 looks as unlike 2012 as 1992 looked unlike 1982, and I'm just not sensitive enough to notice it.
I honestly think that you don't notice change because fashion has become so kalaidoscopic that no one style can ever really register or gain dominance over the others. In a place full of fashion conscious young people I could spot someone dressed from the 50s, 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, or not really trace-able. Every type of thing is so available that nothing really ever looks out of place.
The current style already encompasses everything, so the current style can't change.
Any thoughts about fast fashion? I'm not into it, but I keep hearing ecological complaints about it and I assume the clothes look different. Layers of flimsy garments? Years different from previous years?
Culture is immensely decentralized now as compared to past decades. In the 50s there were only a few tv channels that EVERYONE watched, now there are hundreds that some people watch. In 1955, the telecast of Peter Pan got 65 MILLION viewers, ie over 1/3 of the population of the country watched it. In 1980, 35 percent of viewers watched Dallas. The most popular non-sports show in 2019 was Big Bang Theory, with under 11 percent of the viewership.
All of this applies to music and fiction writing and theater and other forms of culture too. The internet is accelerating this, but we're living in a golden age of niche subcultures, and I think this applies to fashion too. It's not that we got stuck, it's that we got UNSTUCK, and there is no longer a consistent ticking clock of fashion that everyone pays attention to.
If you walk around a big city, particularly in areas with lots of young people, you'll see a huge variety of different "Looks" now, rather than a few looks copied over and over, although there's some of that too, eg the recent fashion for athleisure wear.
So most societies throughout history have been "stuck"?
In the sense of fashion yes. Before modern media, it all had a tendency to flow from royal whims, or stay stable for decades and sometimes centuries. The expense and practical requirements of manufacturing clothing also got in the way of doing interesting innovation on a personal or a subcultural level. In many times and places there are have also been caste systems that were delineated by clothing, completely eliminating fashion as a consideration for many people.
Nowadays anyone can wear anything for cheap.
Very tentative, but I think there's been a recent change in women's makeup as seen on youtube.
There was a style that I didn't like-- an extremely smooth look with fake shadows and highlights and shadows which didn't quite match the actual lighting. Uncanny valley territory.
I'm not seeing as much of it.
Also, there was a fad for *very* bright red lipstick and I'm not seeing it any more.
Maybe the inspiration needed for distinctive styles doesn't happens reliably at decade intervals.
It's too soon. You don't recognise the changes until you look back. 2010 is relatively near in time so it's still forming people's tastes and clothing choices. If you've been wearing cargo pants (90s) and hoodies (popularised in 70s) for the past ten/fifteen/twenty years, then changes aren't as apparent as if you're keeping up with each new season's look.
This article talks about 2010s fashion trends and what came into vogue then:
https://wwd.com/fashion-news/fashion-scoops/2010s-fashion-trends-that-defined-decade-1203393941/
This does the same for 2000s
https://www.complex.com/style/best-fashion-trends-of-early-2000s/all-over-prints
>then changes aren't as apparent as if you're keeping up with each new season's look.
But the thing is, in the 1950s or 60s, people didn't have to actively try to keep up with the trends. It's just what was available in stores and they bought it. Now, much of what's in stores is stuff that could have been made at any point in the past 30 years.
The internet isn't a weird decentralising force; 20th century mass-media was a weird centralising force and its fall is bringing us back to the historical norm.
Early 2000s fashion had skinny low-rise jeans and grommet belts, often with an exposed “whale tail”. Haven’t seen that look for quite a while, but I have been enjoying the triumphant rise of yoga pants during the last decade or so. That said, the proliferation of different subgroups with differing retro influences has become a complicating factor.
I think some of our sense of the distinctiveness of style in earlier periods is that our view of past eras is a simplified version of the reality.
Potential compounding/confounding factor: the first two decades of any century are harder to name. The 20s, 30s, 40s, etc can easily be called as such, but there's confusion about what to call the 00s and 10s (I don't think naughties ever worked). Not having a solid name for them makes it harder to compartmentalise like we do (somewhat inaccurately perhaps) for other decades
I disagree! While it is true that 2022 fashion includes many references to the fashion of the 90s and the 00s, there has been a lot of development. One very noticeable thing is the shift away from skinny jeans, especially in young women's fashion. Another, related trend is that today's fashion influencers get their inspiration from "Streetwear", which is an amalgam of subcultural fashion of the last 50 years (punk, metal, hip hop, fetish, raver, etc.). This is in stark contrast to the influencers of the 10s, who wore several interations of cutesy smart casual clothes.
I can recommend some videos on GenZ vs. Millenials in fashion:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rtl78sE212s&ab_channel=ModernGurlz
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sXFWoPLIuB0&t=638s&ab_channel=MinaLe
You... you think fashion hasn't changed in twenty years? The right option is 3. The right option is very 3.
Not that it hasn't changed, but that it's changed more slowly and subtly. The 1970s had flared pants, the 1980s had big hair and shoulder pads, the 90s had everyone suddenly looking like a Friends character. What do the 2000s have?
Alternatively: you're watching a movie and it wants you to know a particular flashback is set in a particular time period. There's a visual shorthand that will tell you "60s", "70s", "80s", or "90s" in a moment, but if the scene is in the early 2000s what do you show? Guys with spiky blond hair and cargo pants? Three button suits? There's no iconic 2000sness out there.
I key on the phones they are using.
For women in casual fashion wear jeans got lower and shirts got higher leading to more exposed stomachs. It was also fashionable to show off underwear peaking out for both men and women. This led to a significant amount of accessorizing around the belly. Men's pants became loose and were supposed to hang (again exposing underwear) with shirts that were loose enough you could see underneath them. This was often layered and added in jewelry. There were also shifts in formal fashion and the rise of subcultures like the emo or nerd chic crowd. But to me the iconic look is someone like Rihanna(1) or Justin Timberlake(2). And yes, that means spiky short hair for men and long, straight hair for women. Often multicolored for both.
We've had two fashion cycles since then, perhaps most famously shown by that picture of Arianna Grande and Billie Eilish.(3)
Also, I'll second that Bojack Horseman does a good job with this. "Generic 2007 pop song. Autotuned so all the voices sound weird. *Shift to rap bridge* This is a pop song. Uh. It's 2007. Huh. This ain't 2006. It's 2007!"
There is, of course, a generic work outfit of jeans and rough shirts which is pretty unchanging. A handyman in overalls and all that doesn't look that different from his 19th century forebears and even has some similarities with 18th and 17th century work clothes. And we now get a lot more pictures of ordinary people so we see more and more of this common outfit.
1.) https://imgix.bustle.com/uploads/getty/2021/6/30/0ec9ecfc-4269-4ab9-bd31-2f87375065ae-getty-53263934.jpg?w=414&h=645&fit=crop&crop=faces&auto=format%2Ccompress
2.) https://media.gq-magazine.co.uk/photos/5e307365314d3d00088d4eaf/master/w_1280,c_limit/20200128-Timberlake-05.jpg
3.) https://i.ytimg.com/vi/xb_OHL_Nm4w/maxresdefault.jpg
Bojack Horseman always has a parodic montage of things associated with a time period when they do a flashback, and s3e2 flashbacked to 2007, so that seems like a good place to look.
3., please consult the Zoomers for how best to make fun of 90s and 2000s era fashion. Skinny jeans are not in >.<
The Internet resulted in a lot of fragmentation, so it's much less likely that one thing of any type is dominant over other things of that type.
Exactly.
I remember thinking in the 90s that there was no 90s style, but now we do have images. I think 00s is going to be associated with classic hipster aesthetic (low rise skinny jeans, etc) but we will see.
Architecture has very clear 2000s and 2010s styles - I don’t know if that means that architectural styles are easier to see faster than clothing styles, or rather than clothing styles just aren’t as distinct in these decades as architectural styles.
I'd go with
4. The internet has decentralized culture enough that the only "unifying aesthetic" that can exist is the generic. Different subcultures have their own fashion trends and aesthetic identities that progress and evolve, but the mainstream is now crystallized as inoffensive grey.
with a side of
5. Many of the distinctive styles we remember from those decades were themselves subcultures (with the exception of things like Yuppies, which were an attempt by mainstream culture to brand itself as counterculture) with the mainstream of the '60's and '70's looking very much like the '50's.
And a dollop of
6. The late 80's signaled the start of a systemic collapse in public interest in the arts and humanities in favor of grievance studies, STEM, and a culture of criticism, scorn, and ironic detachment, leading to artists either being reduced to safe, flavorless commodity-manufacturers or returning to their default status as a resented pariah class in popular consciousness. In an environment where the mainstream is cripplingly afraid of feeling sincere emotion, art cannot thrive, thus forcing it to retreat to subcultures.
I am leaning heavily on 5 and 3.
Here is an example of ladies fashion that has noticeably changed. IIRC in 00s near all girls/ladies wore some kind of jeans or other trousers (with minority wearing skirts), until they they changed to form fitting leggings around 10s. First it was just teenagers, then young adults, and today the plain joggins have been steadily making their way to "middle aged ladies' business casual" which equals boring and polar opposite of "trendy". So if you were an aspiring time traveler without access to your multidimensional chronometer, you can identify pre-05 and post-05 from the visible presence of garment only, and extrapolate the point between 05 and 22 by looking how widely adopted it was.
If you want to get a more precise timelocation, pay attention to the colors / pattering / texture: I didn't pay much attention to how it changed, but I think first there was plain black, then jeans-like, then weird colors and flower patterns, and for a while, a sporty look of sporty synthetic textile. (Which is also getting a bit old and I am quite confident something different will come soon.)
In men's fashion ... the search words "hipster" and "mustache" have each definite peak in Google Trends data: https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=hipster,mustache
If you add "beard", they seem to be getting more popular and plateau'd only recently.
https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?date=all&geo=US&q=hipster,mustache,beard
I would like to second Scott's recommendation of the Hivewired article on Lacan psychoanalysis.
https://hivewired.wordpress.com/2022/04/27/the-game-of-masks/
It is extremely well written....and really very mind bending.
Question about Nato expansion, "not one inch to the East" etc.
I've seen people on Russia's side of this argument (eg Jeff Sachs) state that promises were broken, and I've seen the West's response which I've tried to describe below, but I've never found someone engage with or try refute that response.
What am I getting wrong/missing?
What happened -
1. During discussions re reunification of Germany, Russia were given verbal assurances that Nato would not expand eastwards within reunified Germany. The phrase "not one inch to the east" was used.
2. But in the end the actual treaty agreed allowed for some troops in what was East Germany.
3. No assurances were ever discussed or given about other former Soviet states joining Nato.
4. Russia itself discussed joining Nato and were told they would need to apply like everyone else and so didn't (my guess is they wouldn't have been admitted if they did apply)
West's view -
A. if it's not in the treaty it doesn't count, democracies change governments all the time, new governments can't be bound by verbal assurances of their predecessors
B. This is especially so if the treaty that was signed already wasn't in line with those verbal assurances
C. No assurances re former soviet states were given.
D. The idea that the states that were actually part of the USSR and then became sovereign not being allowed to join Nato is strange - it's essentially like saying, we promise not to let you join our club even if you want to?
Just some quick words:
5. Reunification of Germany was highly contested, including worries in London and Paris. Important disputed questions between Moscow and Washington included whether reunified Germany could be in NATO at all - or not.
6. At the time of 2+4, the Soviet Union was visibly changing, but still perceived as one of the superpowers.
On the West's view:
I've often heard experts saying basically: nobody believed at the time that NATO expansion to the east was even an option. That's why western diplomats & head of states had no problem emphasising they had no intention to encourage this - and maybe why Moscow didn't insist in putting it into a form of treaty. Combined with the argument: Well, but the world has changed since then.
The West's view as described by you has a couple of weak points in my view:
a) if verbal assurances were given in an issue of key importance to the other side - and it looks like that was the case - then saying 'we don't care anymore, bad luck you didn't force us to put it down', is not very helpful. It seems obvious that this can/will/should annoy/bother the other side.
b) C. is not really true, if verbal assurances were given.
c) we know from everyday situations, that people take statements that are either important or convenient to them much more serious than those that are 'unconvient/relatively irrelevant'. While interactions among states are often more formalized, I don't think political leaders & nations are immune against this kind of thing. So, if verbal assurances were given and believed by Soviet/Russian elites, they have an importance, even if they cannot be formally claimed.
d) In 2+4 negotiations, western leaders wanted to get consent from Moscow on issues that at the time were seen as a huge step for the Soviet Union. Moscow went further than many thought possible at the time (or certainly two years earlier). During that process, the image was conveyed that - given Moscow's consent - the new situation would not be used in a way that Moscow might find 'threatening' (for it's security or also it's major interests). On NATO, it was emphased (several times verbally) that NATO expansion to the east was not an option.
So when a couple of decades later western leaders basically say 'oh, but now we don't care anymore, other things are more important', it can understandibly lead to an image in M. of 'we made concessions in good faith of not loosing out in this deal, and now the costs for us get higher and higher, and you guys suddenly 'can't remember''. This is already being very close to feeling cheated upon.
e) Also in democracies, leaders feel bound by the history of their nations and by historic relationsships / assurances. 'Oh, but anyway we have no mandate to promise anything that is not in written' is a very easy excuse.
f) The assurances you mention in D. would be strange in a perfect world. But for now, the world is not perfect. Again, we see very often - in group settings, business hierarchies and also among states - that there are spheres of influence and 'historical' interests. And that somebody encroaching on those is not well accepted. In this view, a formal promise of 'never allowed to ... ' excluding sovereign states forever would seem strange, but saying sth. like 'look, this would be really annoying to X, let's talk about this in a decade again' seems rather normal.
A lot there! And v.interesting/informative. But I think you're jumping past most of the argument right at the start with - "if verbal assurances were given in an issue of key importance to the other side - and it looks like that was the case"
ah, I thought that part was undisputed here. sorry, don't have more time now ... maybe later. and thanks
Good explanation here, around 16 minutes in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aHj0K9PofCw
Cheers, be interested in your take.
What's our earliest citation to NATO promising not to expand? When was the first time it was talked about in media?
My understanding is that it was the US Secretary of State in talks about German reunification in 1990. But it wasn't a promise for Nato not to expand it was in specific context, and without the backing of Nato, Germany.
The current Russian government feels existentially threatened by the expansion of the European Union, because the European Union is full of happy, prosperous people with hope for a better future and Russia isn't. If it becomes clear that this option is open even to Eastern European Slavic people who used to live in poor post-Soviet kleptocracies, and that Step 1 is to hold a "color revolution" and oust the post-Soviet kleptocrats, then the Russian people might talk to Russian-speaking Eastern European Slavs and get ideas.
The current Russian government feels existentially threatened by NATO, because NATO stops them from dealing with the existential threat posed by the EU in the obvious way - invading or threatening to invade Eastern European nations before they can join the EU. And because they fear that when Moscow has its color revolution, NATO will roll in with tanks and planes to stop the Red Army from just crushing the protesters under tank treads like they "deserve" and instead remake Russia as a nice NATO/EU protectorate.
To be fair, NATO does have a track record of trying to do that sort of thing, albeit not so far against any dictator with access to nuclear weapons and they probably would balk at intervening in a Russian Revolution.
The Russian regime's security requires that basically all the nations bordering Russia be filled with people even more miserable than the Russians, with no hope of a better future except by sucking up to Russia in exchange for being allowed to be only *slightly* less miserable than the Russians. And the Russian regime thought that, when we said NATO wouldn't expand eastwards, we were promising to let them arrange things that way.
Also, Vladimir Putin was probably happiest when he was an up-and-coming KGB officer climbing towards the highest ranks of power in the greatest empire of the age, and now that empire is basically equivalent to Nigeria with more oil, more barren wasteland, and nuclear weapons. He wants it all back the way it was. He gave Morden the same answer that Londo Mollari did, and now the Ukrainians are playing the role of the Narns.
> the European Union is full of happy, prosperous people with hope for a better future and Russia isn't.
On the other hand, it doesn’t really feel that way here in western europe. At least in italy, we definitely have no hope for the future
It’s certainly not the case that every country bar FR and DE feels this way. Italy is especially bad, with 30 years of economic stagnation but that’s not the case everywhere else. Most states are not that bad but chronic low growth and unemployment are undoubtedly an issue in many countries. And a shortage of affordable housing.
Even here in Ireland, where living standards have steadily risen and there are plenty of jobs, it’s not all rosy: housing is a disaster, especially in Dublin. But there isn’t despair.
As it happens, France is one of the least satisfied countries per EU-wide option polls. Just add up the recent combined vote for LePen, Melenchon and Zammour.
Globalisation has been good for graduates but not for the working class in the West generally, not just the EU. In the US you have the rust belt and rise of Trump. France has post-industrial decline and LePen, Italy has had Berlusconi (the proto Trump), Northern League, Five Star…almost everywhere is seeing the old left-right split morphing into a losers-winners from globalisation divide.
What’s the solution? I really don’t know. The EU announces a new multi-hundred billion euro plan every years and they all fail. There just isn’t the same demand for working men especially, and migration keeps wages down for trades and semi-skilled jobs. You can’t get a mortgage because your wages are too low and property too pricy. Then nobody wants to marry you, you don’t have kids, etc. The extreme version was Russia in the 1990s, which led to an alcoholism epidemic. The West is just doing it more slowly. US opioid epidemic for example: but does anyone in power care?
(I'm not sure we really did promise nato wouldn't expand eastwards)
As discussed in TM's subthread above, we did give them promises less explicit and less binding than a ratified treaty but substantial enough that it's understandable they feel miffed when we do the thing they thought we had promised not to do.
More generally, "I didn't *really* make that promise; I cleverly got him to do what I want by letting him *think* I made the promise" is penny wise and pound foolish in politics. There's no God above who smites with lightning people who break their promises, there's just the predictable consequences of pissing people off by putting them in a position where they think - correctly or otherwise - that you've broken a promise.
Hi there,
This seems to just assume the Russian side of things is basically correct. It may well be btw, but I'm trying to get at why.
Let's say a Russian characterises the West's thought process as per your second para, "we [the West] didn't *really* make that promise; but we cleverly got them to do what we want by letting them *think* we made that promise" (I've changed I and him to we and them)
I think you could sum up the West's response as - "we genuinely didn't make that promise, they are taking something said out of the narrow context in which it was said and ignoring lots of other stuff."
Then the West's side gives various reasons for this, as per OP plus on further research some others*, which never seems to be replied to by people taking or even just explaining the Russia's side of things.
*including that, in the West's view, domestic pressure lead to Russian politicians knowingly misrepresenting later discussions/agreements as including assurances they didn't
NATO isn't going to invade Russia. Nobody's going to invade Russia, because they've got nukes. If Putin claims otherwise, he's lying. NATO is a defensive alliance, not because their charter says so, but because Russia has nukes.
Putin hates NATO, not because they threaten him (they don't!), but because they stand in the way of him fulfilling his ambition to conquer his neighbors. He's not invading Ukraine because they joined NATO; he's only able to invade Ukraine because they didn't join NATO.
So why did he invade Ukraine? I don't know. I don't particularly trust any of the various reasons he and his supporters have given. Maybe he wants Ukraine's farmland, or some other resource, or maybe he just wants to rule over as many people as he can.
>I don't particularly trust any of the various reasons he and his supporters have given.
What about the one where he sees Ukraine's sovereignty as historical aberration, which he wants rectified? Both his rhetoric and actions seem consistent with treating it as a rebel province, including the part where the "special operation" wouldn't pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis, even if Ukraine had been easily captured in its entirety.
That one might well be true. Or it might be a cover for a more cynical motive.
If Ukraine had been captured as quickly and easily as expected, why would that not pass cost-benefit analysis? A week or two of other people's sons fighting, and then Putin has a lot more subjects, and the enhanced prestige of having won a war.
>why would that not pass cost-benefit analysis?
I meant for Russia in the long term, not for the tsar himself in the short-medium. Of course, he is old now and doesn't appear to give a shit for anybody except himself, even for his kleptocratic cronies, so whatever amuses him is good enough.
My bafflement about the whole NATO Expansion complaint is that NATO is fundamentally a defensive alliance and so its expansion doesn't actually represent a threat. Russia is a nuclear power with a strategic second strike capability. A thousand Abrams sat at idle in Red Square would no more threatening to the continuation of their state than NATO at its 1990 boarders.
The only thing the expansion of NATO does is prevent former soviet block countries being invaded and having their regimes forcibly changed by a resurgent Russia. And if Russia wants to whine that they can't invade and oppress their neighbours any more because those joined a defensive alliance specifically formed to curtail Russian imperialism, well they should just say that out loud and see what kind of sympathy they get. The idea of a broken promise or threatening expansion is nonsense.
> The only thing the expansion of NATO does is prevent former soviet block countries being invaded and having their regimes forcibly changed by a resurgent Russia.
But nobody ever should prevent forced regime changes by USA, god forbid. USA bombs Middle East countries "for freedom". Russia opposes NATO expansion "to prevent threat". Lies in politics are the norm, and there is no rational reasons for Russia to stop lying first.
Also, military invasion is not the only way NATO can threaten Russia. Any major country seeks to control its weaker neighbors, through economy, culture or force. Russia's economy is not going to outpace Europe, USA or China's any time soon. Culture plays a big part, but many ex-USSR countries take steps to break that bond, too - none going as far as Ukraine with its campaign against Russian language (which began way before 2014). Force is the only remaining recourse, and therefore NATO is a threat. Also, with NATO membership, countries would find it easier to (and maybe would be pressured to) break both cultural and economic bonds with Russia faster.
Now, why would USA want to threaten Russia (with non-military means, but using its presence in ex-USSR countries) if it did nothing wrong, e.g. did not invade any of its neighbors, you may ask. Well, for any reason, really. Imagine all countries around Russia closing their borders to all trade whenever USA doesn't like something Russia did, like maybe not allowing US companies to capture a part of market, or acting against US interests in some other part of the world, say, named Syria. Hell, with some of the possible US presidential candidates voting for a wrong country in Eurovision could start an economic blockade.
I mean, it's pretty much what's happening right now with sanctions, but Russia can use it neighbors to evade some sanctions right now. If all of those neighbors are controlled by USA, there would be no such possibilities.
So, yes, NATO expansion is a threat, even if we don't take the possibility of a military invasion seriously (which is not ENTIRELY true - a civil war in Russia, for example, might invite a NATO invasion, if nukes are either divided between warring sides or disabled somehow).
It seems like you define "threat" as "anything which reduces Russia's cultural/economic/military control over its weaker neighbors (which is something 'any major country' wants)" which, if true, is revealing.
Revealing of what? That Russia is a country just like any other country? USA gets to define pretty much anything anywhere in the world as a threat to its interests. Hell, USA literally threatened China with war if China built a naval base on Solomon islands recently. I mean, China is not going to attack USA, because USA has nuclear weapons, so what threat could a naval base possess? Maybe Chinese sailors just reeeeealy like the local cuisine.
Or as a thought exercise, imagine a democratically-elected Mexican government deciding suddenly to join a China-led "defensive alliance" for whatever reasons. How fast would you think American tanks would be in Mexico City, even though this alliance clearly poses no threat to USA? (Actually, tanks might not be needed, as America is far more skilful than Russia in replacing unwanted governments, but if Plan A failed, Plan B or Plan C would certainly involve tanks; there would be no Plan S, which is "do nothing and allow it").
>Hell, USA literally threatened China with war if China built a naval base on Solomon islands recently. I mean, China is not going to attack USA, because USA has nuclear weapons, so what threat could a naval base possess?
The threat is to Australia, not the US.
>Even though this alliance clearly poses no threat to USA?
There's no conceivable reason Mexico would do this except to give China the ability to have military forces close to the US.
Ukraine has literally been invaded by Russia 8 years ago and had territory annexed. Russia also invaded several of its other neighbors in the past few decades. That Ukraine wants NATO membership for strictly defensive purposes is trivially true and justifiable.
When has the US done anything remotely comparable to how Russia has treated Ukraine? Over a century ago?
There is no analogy here. That the US wouldn't be okay with the Chinese military on its doorstep does not mean Russia are justified in violently opposing the mere SUGGESTION of NATO membership for Ukraine.
2003. In 2003 we invaded Iraq and replaced its government with a government more to our liking. We did it for trumped up bullshit reasons that most people saw through at the time (WMDs), when the real reason was to transform the country and region in a way we preferred (beacon of democracy in the heart of the Arab world).
I'd call that a pretty close analog.
Cuba was allied with the USSR for decades, and is very close to the U.S. After the failure of our assassination attempts and the Bay of Pigs, did we launch a full invasion with tanks in Havana? No. We decided it wasn't worth it. Do you think we would treat an alliance between China and Mexico differently?
I think USA would treat it differently, yes. It's the difference between Finland joining NATO and Ukraine joining NATO: both are undesirable to Russia, but one have to be tolerated (if protested), and the other can be dealt with.
The reason is, Finland is basically already protected by NATO - like Cuba was protected by USSR. A full invasion of Cuba might have led to a very hot, possibly nuclear war (USSR probably could not protect Cuba directly due to its remoteness, but could instead attack American troops in Europe, maybe; Cuban Missile Crisis was partially a result of Castro's fear that USA would indeed continue attempts to remove him from power, and USA only really stopped because USSR proved to treat Cuba as a serious issue).
If Ukraine already had American troops stationed on its soil, Russia would dare not attack. The same goes for our hypothetical Mexico situation - if Chinese army was already quartering south of Texas, USA probably would have to resort to economic means and covert operations. But if it was only a statement of policy (written into Constitution, as it was in Ukraine - yes, they literally changed their Main Law to say "we gonna be in NATO"), to be acted on in some (possibly near) future? Regime change time.
So there’s a gap we’ll have to iron out if you want to have a sincere talk about Russia/Ukraine. When you talk about the USA, you seem to define “threat” narrowly (i.e. a defensive alliance between China and Mexico “poses no threat to USA”).
But when you talk about Russia, you seem to use a much broader definition for “threat” that seems to include anything which would make a weaker neighbor “find it easier to (and maybe would be pressured to) break both cultural and economic bonds with Russia.”
I’m happy to have a conversation under either framework. Under the first, I don’t think you can qualify Ukraine or NATO expansion as a “threat” to Russia. Under the second I think if you certainly can call it a “threat” since the definition of “threat” is so broad, but now you have to have a conversation about how great a “threat” has to be to justify a military response, and I think Russia loses out at that stage of the argument. But for either conversation “threat” needs a consistent definition – we can’t just keep switching shoes based on our actors.
I did not try to define "threat" narrowly differently for USA - it was a callback to the original comment I was answering to initially, where it was posited that a defensive alliance such as NATO cannot pose a threat to Russia, since a direct military attack by a NATO country on Russia is impossible because of nuclear deterrence. I guess I should have made it clearer that I was referencing billymorph's argument, not only yours.
My point is that all (powerful) countries generally tend to use the broad definition of threat.
> deciding suddenly to join a China-led "defensive alliance"
Ukraine wasn't about to join NATO. The fact that they were in an active border dispute with Russia would've kept them out.
Even Germany (to say nothing of more rebellious states like Hungary) was against Ukraine membership. The decision needs to be unanimous so just keeping any one country (at a time) willing to veto Ukraine's membership would keep them out.
I am close to thinking that Russia "deserved" to have a NATO-free Ukraine. But they had that already and could've kept it going indefinitely.
I must admit it's one thing that puzzled me from the beginning. Ukraine could possibly gain NATO membership very quickly if it just let Donbas and Crimea separate. And Russia has little reasons to invade. It's not like it really NEEDS this region to be a more-or-less successful European country. Its old-school Soviet-era heavy industries and mining are obsolete and useless in trade with EU, and the hit that agricultural capacity would have taken could be offset, probably. I did not believe the war would start until the very last moment - it seemed such a counter-productive move!
This almost makes me believe the version about a planned Ukrainian assault on Donbas. But not quite, since it also would be a counter-productive move - for Ukraine. I suppose there was more to the situation that one could see from the ground level. A VERY generous interpretation I have (since I like to tell myself stories about politics) is that Putin actually wanted sanctions and almost-isolation to shock the country into action, as all his previous attempts to make it move drowned in general apathy and bureaucracy and dead-locked special interests. That would be such a story-book move! And therefore, highly unlikely one, of course.
Islam is fundamentally a religion of peace, and yet some outsiders are notoriously… cautious… about it's expansion.
It is a threat because of the distinction between ability and intent.
NATO is an organization with a great military ability. It makes sense to be threatened by great military ability.
"Fundamentally a defensive alliance", "Prevent countries from being invaded", and so forth are descriptions of NATO's intent. To be reassured by this, Russia has to (1) be convinced that this is actually NATO's intent, and (2) accept that this intent won't change. I think that (2) is basically impossible even if we grant (1), but I also think that (1) is historically incredibly difficult to achieve.
> NATO is fundamentally a defensive alliance and so its expansion doesn't actually represent a threat
I'm pro-NATO but this argument just falls flat. I wouldn't expect Russia to accept "it's just a defensive alliance, bro!" and can't imagine lacking the theory of mind to see why they'd be suspicious.
I think what we need more than anything is some kind of consensus definition of “threat.” That seems to be a source of a lot of talking past each other.
If a “threat” is “something that presents a credible likelihood of externally imposing regime change on Russia,” then I don’t think NATO (with or without Ukraine) qualifies. No matter how strong NATO's military capabilities are, the idea of any NATO member (a) wanting to dance with Russia’s nuclear arsenal by attacking, and (b) successfully convincing the 29 other NATO members to go for it, is laughable – with or without Ukraine in the mix.
On the other hand, if a “threat” is “anything contrary to Russia’s interests, or that empowers others to act contrary to Russia’s interests,” then we’re having a different conversation.
I think that’s step 1, and then if we can figure that out we can try to pin down what level of “threat” justifies invading another country as a threat-counter. If we’re operating under something like the first definition, then a fair number of “threats” may legitimize that kind of aggression, but if we’re operating under something like the second definition, there are a whole lot of “threats” which don’t come close to justifying troops crossing borders.
On the other hand, I can't imagine any scenario in which NATO would invade Russia, if Russia stays within its own borders and behaves itself. In that sense it's a purely defensive alliance.
What I'm curious about is whether the Russians genuinely think that a NATO invasion of Russia is a plausible scenario, or whether they're being disingenuous.
On an object level I agree that NATO isn't going to invade Russia.
I mean, right now would the best possible time to invade Russia, and NATO isn't.
But I don't accept Russia to necessarily believe this.
I think they feel they have the right not to believe it. But they can't actually believe Nato would invade in absence of Russian aggression.
They didn't on the collapse of the soviet union and they contributed a lot of money to help Russia. They also mostly underspend on defence. They've built pipelines making them reliant on Russian gas. They've turned a blind eye to annexation in Georgia and Ukraine. Most importantly, even if they wanted to invade, Russia has loads of nukes. Plus Nato is an alliance of loads of countries who would need to agree.
In no scenario does it make sense for Nato to invade Russia without Russian aggression, and even with Russian aggression it's hard to think of a situation where Nato invades.
I'm pretty sure they just see it as limiting their power and influence and have a general sense of unfairness and grievance.
i’m not sure this is not a non sequiror. NATO is (mostly, ask Lybia for an exception) a defensive alliance, but that doesn’t mean people can’t feel threatened by it. like, it Mexico, Iran, North Korea, and Canada all formed a defensive alliance, and North Korean troops set up shop in British Columbia, then, even all four of those countires, for their own reasons, could plausibly want protection from American domination, America would not be happy with, and feel threatened by, the alliance— and rightly so.
of course, making Russia feel threatened, in a very specic way, is the point of NATO. the reason Mexico and North Korea aren’t in an alliance is that the US didn’t treat Mexico the way Russia treated her neighbors. Russian aggression forced eastern europe to pursue a “defnesive” alliance, which is a nice way of sayinhg “alliance that is a threat of retailation.” the threat being “you better not bully your neighbors or the we’ll hurt you.” this is a thret, and moscow rightly treats it as such. it is a justified threat, but a threat nonetheless.
Isn't whether or not NATO being fundamentally a defensive alliance just a matter of perspective?
I'm guessing that non NATO members probably view it just as a regular military alliance.
I would consider the NATO bombing of Yugoslavia an example of NATO attacking someone (regardless of whether or not it was justified).
In the cuban missile crisis, I think the USSRs stated goals were also along the lines of "defence". It seems to me to follow logically that if the US had the right to block the missiles in Cuba then Russia should also have similar rights.
Nobody was planning to put missiles in Ukraine. And the argument that someone *might* in the future runs into the existence of the Baltic states, which have been full NATO members for decades while being just as close to Moscow as Ukraine is.
Likewise, if the US had decided to go ahead and invade Cuba after the missiles got removed, the world would probably consider that a huge dick move.
Yeah, if European countries were planning to invade (in the long-term) and were lying about it, they would set up something like NATO to get everything ready, and of course lie about it.
On an object level I agree NATO isn't going to invade.
Probably the best response would be to collect similar "verbal assurances" from Russia's side during the same period, if there were any, and then compare how many of those were fulfilled.
I don't know the details about the negotiations, but I suppose the general expectation during those optimistic times was that after the fall of communism, Russia would become less of an evil empire. Don't know if any of that was said explicitly.
There were proposed defensive assurances discussed for Ukraine, too. But they never made it into the actual treaty.
It seems counterproductive to a useful world if even bringing up negotiable items during parley means you are held to them.
I found John Mearscheimer to be quite interesting.
There are several countries in the world with immense power. These powers would be wise to take each other's interests into account and anticipate each others reactions.
For example: if Russia and Cuba decided to build nuclear missile sites on cuban territory they should probably expect a reaction from the US.
Why are you focussed on treaties and promises?
I think the claims you're making explicitly here are true but quite weak, but some of the stronger claims they might be interpreted as implicit proxies for are false - neither "it would be wise to" or "should probably expect" has anything to do with moral justification or lack thereof, which is what I interpret the OP as being about.
Point taken. maybe I was not exactly on topic.
I think though that Point D, about limiting NATO membership did invite other perspectives or explanations as to why it would not be strange to deny willing applicant countries NATO membership.
I think for example that there is a fairly reasonable realist argument for why Taiwan should not be offered NATO membership. We might not agree with that argument but i think it's quite logical at least.
I'm not certain that offering former soviet republics NATO membership made the world a safer or better place on the whole.
I'm not focussed on treaties/promises over other things, I'm simply interested to understand the arguments of both sides re the current situation, and this was one point where I couldn't find a response from one side.
I've watched Mearscheimer's youtube lecture. Of course, these powers would be wise to take each others interests/their likely reactions into account. I understand this side of the 'pro-Russia' argument, although I don't agree the examples of China or Russia plonking nukes in Cuba or Mexico are entirely equivalent.
I think Mearscheimer also simply asserts that promises were made not to expand east. I suppose his implied argument is that Russia is a great power, and thus its interests trump that of other ex-soviet states.
I think what you're missing in the above is that points 1-4 and A-D, while accurate, don't tell you most of the story as to why the war is happening in Ukraine right now or why Russia is acting the way it is. The better explanation to me is to look at it through the Mearscheimer / realpolitik lens.
What happened
Russian View
1) NATO (read America) started off as the anti USSR (Russia) alliance and now they are offering membership to our neighbors. Given that 1) NATO has intervened in other countries (Yugoslavia, Libya, Afghanistan) and 2) defensive weapons can also be used offensively this represents a threat to us.
2) Ukraine integrating into NATO / the EU -> Ukraine takes off economically -> Ukraine itself becomes a threat to us. Countries are powerful if they have a lot of people and a lot of wealth. We don't want the have that on our borders, we want to dominate our borders. Becoming a regional hegemon is the goal (Mearscheimer's argument) - it means we are secure in the anarchic global system.
Poland GDP per capita 1990 -> 2020: $1,731 -> $15,656
Latvia GDP per capita 1995 -> 2020: $3,094 - > $17,794
Ukraine GDP per capita 1990 -> 2020: $1,570 -> $3,727
3) We don't trust NATO because of your listed 1-4 and A-D so any promises NATO makes are meaningless.
American / Western View
We like countries that look like ours, western style democracies (WSDs). Having a bunch of WSDs everywhere makes us secure because 1) WSDs (generally, I cant think of a post WW2 example) don't go to war with each other and 2) we can integrate them into our global system of institutions and trade with them. This is why we want to expand NATO and the EU.
I also think you're selling Mearscheimer's argument a bit short, I think it addresses a lot of the criticisms that I've read in this thread and elsewhere. Mearscheimer more or less says - Russia has a big military. It has a lot of people. So it is in Ukraines best interest to NOT piss of Russia. The best outcome for Ukraine is that Ukraine becomes a neutral country, with close ties to both the West and Russia, something like cold war Finland was. In Mearscheimer's opinion if the Russian's invaded Ukraine and America has to make the decision to defend / abandon we have already failed, this was a situation that could have and should have been avoided in the first place.
I believe that Mearscheimer explicitly argues that Russia is a great power and we should consider their interests when we pursue ours. Its really down to the structure of the international system - there is no higher authority to call when a nation state is out of line. Saying that Ukraine is a sovereign nation and can pursue its own interest is true, but to think that Russia is going to just stand by when Ukraine is pursuing a policy that Russia itself sees as threatening is naïve. Yes I think everyone should respect each other and I'm sure so does Mearscheimer but nation states are operating under "pursue your security and interests" and this often conflicts with other nations sovereignty. So keep we (America) should keep that in mind when pursuing foreign policy instead of basing it on how we think the world should behave.
My OP was on quite a narrow point. What's the pro-Russian (on nato promises) response to A - D?
I think your - v.good! - post is a lot broader and doesn't address those points directly, but actually highlights what the real response is. That response that can't really be spoken directly as it amounts to, "we're a big power and the countries next to us aren't, and so our interests are more important, and you (the West) should go along with that because... we're a big power and the others aren't."
Of course, maybe the West should go along with it for that reason, and no doubt the West doesn't because of self interest as much as moral principle. But I really do think that the Russian's in charge know that there's no actual, physical threat to Russia from Nato so long as they leave borders where they are. The threat is to their power and influence over other countries and their general sense of feeling like the big man... and they shouldn't start bombing cities over this.
>My OP was on quite a narrow point. What's the pro-Russian (on nato promises) response to A - D?
If you're looking for a narrowly tailored pro-Russia response to A-D I'm not sure there is one, I don't think Russians / pro-Russians fundamentally care about those questions. They might even concede to your points. I just don't think it factors too much into their decision making besides them not trusting NATOs word. To them NATO is a threat, that vastly outweighs whatever should or should not be expected from a verbal promise or treaty or who should morally be allowed to join which clubs.
My above comment was more in response to your later comment (below):
>I'm not focussed on treaties/promises over other things, I'm simply interested to understand the arguments of both sides re the current situation, and this was one point where I couldn't find a response from one side.
>That response that can't really be spoken directly as it amounts to, "we're a big power and the countries next to us aren't, and so our interests are more important, and you (the West) should go along with that because... we're a big power and the others aren't."
Russia is a big power, with nukes. To an extent we have to think about their concerns when we (the US) is pursuing its own foreign policy. I agree with you, there is no fairness or morality to this, but this is what happens in the international system. And I think that we should be pursuing our own foreign policy with that in mind, according to how the system DOES work, and not how we think the system SHOULD work. To me (really Mearscheimer but I agree) if we pursued the policy based on how the system DOES work then we would have recognized Russia would not tolerate NATO in Ukraine. We would not have encouraged Ukraine to join NATO and pushed for a neutral Ukraine, integrated with both Russia and the West. I'm really just agreeing with Mearscheimer here, his opinion on this is below. You did reference one of his videos, so maybe this wasn't convincing to you and we disagree. But it was to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JrMiSQAGOS4
And to add / regurgitate Mearscheimer - I don't think that "we are big and important, others aren't" is the the best way to frame it if you want to understand the Russian side. I think the better framing (better in the sense that it tells you more about Russia's actions) is that Russia sees NATO as a security threat for reasons 1 & 2 I posted above. I think the security framing tells us more because the two countries Russia has invaded, Ukraine & Georgia, were told in the 2008 Budapest memo they could join NATO (per Mearscheimer). And what then what happened - Georgia got invaded soon after the memo and then Crimea got annexed in 2014 immediately after the pro-West Maidan Revolution.
>Of course, maybe the West should go along with it for that reason, and no doubt the West doesn't because of self interest as much as moral principle. But I really do think that the Russian's in charge know that there's no actual, physical threat to Russia from Nato so long as they leave borders where they are. The threat is to their power and influence over other countries and their general sense of feeling like the big man... and they shouldn't start bombing cities over this.
I do not think NATOs plan was to leave the borders where they were, I think NATOs plan was to expand the borders into Ukraine and Georgia, again see the 2008 Budapest memo. Russia saw this as a threat. If you disagree fine. But ultimately its not up to me or you what is a threat to Russian security, its up to Russia. Only Russia gets to determine that, ultimately they are going to act on their own formulations not ours.
I feel like this argument doesn't quite work because there is nothing we could have done, including fully rebuffing Ukraine's overtures to the West and having the CIA assassinate Zelensky in favor of a pro-neutrality leader, that would have stopped this invasion. I find it very interesting that a lot of people in the rationalist community are so driven to frame Putin's invasion as being rooted in cold-blooded clear-headed realpolitik even as Russia tells the rest of the world over and over in increasingly tall burning letters "OUR INTEREST IN UKRAINE IS IDEOLOGICAL AND DRIVEN BY PUTIN'S EXTREME ETHNO-NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY" and Russia's government tries to speedrun proving Orwell's statement about Nazism returning under the guise of anti-Nazism right. It strikes me as being very similar to the academics who insisted that ISIS weren't REALLY driven by a totalitarian interpretation of Islam so extremist it made Wahabism look stable- they were just anti-imperialists, and as soon as the US and Israel stopped meddling in the ME everything would go fine and dandy for the Arabic states.
> I feel like this argument doesn't quite work because there is nothing we could have done, including fully rebuffing Ukraine's overtures to the West and having the CIA assassinate Zelensky in favor of a pro-neutrality leader, that would have stopped this invasion.
I do think this could have been avoided if we listened to Russia's protests about NATO expansion. I haven't seen much evidence that Russia was aggressively expanding outside its borders until the 2008 Bucharest memorandum and Georgia invasion, to me it seems we were largely cooperating with Russia. Maybe you are aware of something I am not? If so I'm interested in reading it.
> I find it very interesting that a lot of people in the rationalist community are so driven to frame Putin's invasion as being rooted in cold-blooded clear-headed realpolitik even as Russia tells the rest of the world over and over in increasingly tall burning letters "OUR INTEREST IN UKRAINE IS IDEOLOGICAL AND DRIVEN BY PUTIN'S EXTREME ETHNO-NATIONALIST IDEOLOGY"
Personally its because he has also been saying that his interest in Ukraine is to stop Westernization and NATO, and he has been saying that for a lot longer time. I'm sure that there is some ideology involved in the decision but that just seems a lot less compelling of a reason to me than not wanting a hostile alliance on your border, in a country where you have been invaded through twice in the previous century. Both of which resulted in millions of deaths.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/On_the_Historical_Unity_of_Russians_and_Ukrainians
This is what I am aware of. The second this book was published, everybody should have updated their priors about what motivates Putin. I don't believe this is some kind of elaborate double-bluff or smokescreen., but instead Putin giving explicit revealed preferences. The rest of the Russian State's media has been repeating the arguments within verbatim and expanding on them, continuously driving home the concept that there is no difference between the Ukrainian national identity, their ethnicity, their culture, and Nazism.
To reiterate: Putin explicitly says "there is no Ukraine, there are no Ukrainians, Ukrainian culture is a lie, these people are merely Russians." Russian state media has clearly and repeatedly outlined a policy of 'Deukrainization" that involves the destruction of Ukrainian historical artifacts, texts, and buildings and a mass reeducation of the populace. Ukrainians in the Donbass region are being relocated to concentration camps in Russia where, if we are to take Russian state media's claims the appropriate amount of seriously, they are being relieved of their delusions that they are Ukrainians instead of Russian subjects that are clinging to an intrinsically-evil national identity and culture. Russia's constitution has been revised to explicitly tie the Russian state as being fundamentally founded on "the civilization-building nature of the Russian ethnicity" (not directly related, but germane to the point). Russian textbooks are being revised to remove mentions of Ukraine as ever having existed independently from Russia even back to the days of the Kievan Rus (this is part of a larger push to center New Chronology, the Lysenkoism of history, as the mainstream Russian narrative on history despite it being a manifestation of psychosis). Russian state media now openly calls for an eschatological war against the entire West, using explicitly apocalyptic language ("We may all die, but we will go to Heaven while they will just rot.") According to you, all of this is being done purely to combat perceived NATO aggression.
For once, and I cannot believe I am saying this, I am in agreement with trebuchet: if none of this convinces you that Russian state is embracing extreme ideological ethno-nationalism at a rapid rate and is making decisions based on this ideology rather than realpolitik, what WOULD?
Sorry, i shouldn't have phrased my question about you and your focus.
I meant in general that I have found that realist perspectives are not very commonly mentioned, and the focus seems to be more on moral idealism.
I think that's because moral realism becomes a lot less palatable when it starts boiling down to "too bad, so sad, we should just let Russia commit cultural genocide against former USSR republics because that's the way of the world." I mean, that technically DOES optimize for peace if you don't define cultural genocide as violence...
A lot of Rationalism, to its credit, is not realist in the sense that it believes the way the world currently is is not how the world has to be and we shouldn't just accept, for example, that people starving to death in third-world countries while one meal in five is thrown out in the US is just how things are.
It doesn't even optimize for peace in the long run, since it just means Russia gains increasing ability to continue expanding. If you don't fight in Kiev, you'll soon be fighting in Berlin.
The realist position isn't that we should just let Russia do whatever they want to their sphere of influence / Ukraine. The realist position was that Russia was not a threat to us prior to ~2008, they were not being aggressive. The realists (Kennon, Kissinger, Mearscheimer) all said that expanding NATO east was a bad idea and that it would provoke Russia. For Ukraine in particular Mearscheimer's position is that the best outcome was that Ukraine becomes a neutral country with strong ties to the West & Russia. After Russia becomes an antagonist this becomes really hard, especially after 2014. Neutrality lets them grow their economy and not get invaded. More or less in the same boat as cold war Finland. And then we (USA) can be friends with Russia to contain China.
Maybe you agree, maybe you don't. But I think you should at least listen to what the realists are advocating for FROM the realists (and not some anon) before you write it off.
No worries at all.
There is a lot of focus on the moral aspect - rightly, I think. But there's lots of realist perspectives/discussion too. "We need to keep the gas on", "Putin only responds to strength", "We must avoid nuclear war", "appeasement leads to worse problems" etc.
Russia right now isn't so much a country as much as it is a territory of a specific clique that's been in control for a decade and a half. It doesn't have national interests right now, it just has the interests of Putin's cronies having suppressed all political opposition, and now it isn't about a 'zone of influence', it's really about preventing any ex-Soviet nations from demonstrating that they're capable of transitioning away from authoritarian militarism, the only type of politics those siloviki-involved people have any future under. 'Large' and 'powerful' these days is mainly a question of the economy and just look at Russia's, proportionate to its size. I'm saying this as someone with relatives there: Russia got a really bad case of brainworms which ate their host from the inside out and are now trying to spread onto other places. They get threatened by any shows of ex-Soviet states' own immune systems flaring up and suddenly rejecting the larvae already injected into them - for Ukraine it was the "Euromaidan". US and China, whatever their flaws are at least have some manner of a functional economies, Russia is trying to find ways to keep pure rot going.
And just in case: it's a country where 80% don't speak a second non-EE language while every information channel in the native tongue was turned into state-controlled propaganda. The population has no idea what the world actually looks like, not even what their own country does, same case can be made for Putin as he's reported to by his own corrupt subordinates. USSR was bad enough, he managed to turn what's left into a shambling zombie. I don't think he even had the popularity to win elections for the past two cycles if not for being able to just write in favorable results as a result of usurping the entirety of the state apparatus.
"Want" is different from "need" or "deserve." I think that's the source of a lot of the confusion here. Large, powerful heavily armed countries want lots of things, damn near unlimited things.
There's this shallow reading of Mearscheimer that seems to be going around, where people take the very reasonable-sounding premise "great powers should consider the sphere of influence that other great powers want, and would be wise to expect conflict when those spheres overlap" and stretch it to "Russia wants to control Ukraine, but Ukraine doesn't want to be controlled by Russia, and NATO made it easier for Ukraine to resist, so NATO is in conflict with Russia's wants and therefore this war is really all NATO's fault." Which is basically the geopolitical version of my neighbor telling me he wouldn't have to beat his kids so hard if I hadn't called the cops on him.
It's not at all hard to understand this, in fact I believe that's what Russia wants...
It's also easy to abuse. "We have to accept reality" seems innocuous and obvious, but the way a lot of pro-Russian advocates use it, "accepting reality" means "letting Russia do whatever it wants because whatever Russia says it believes is real is real for Russia."
Which is great if you're Russia and you want to invade other countries and then just say "tHis Is HIS fAuLT i waS sCarED," but for everybody else at the table it's just a postmodern approach to kneecapping your own negotiating position
It's often useful to pretend your side has no agency.
Congrats, you got it right: 1 to 4 + A to D. This will not stop Lavrov's army of Putin-Trolls (+ useful "slightly-less-smarts") to claim the opposite. Read them on quora, in comments of other media, if convoluted agitation is your thing. - Pardon, if I did not get your question right. I am friendly, mostly. :) If you could elaborate in case I misunderstood?- (And yes, there are some smart and honest people, who are seeing Nato as an aggressor even in the context of Putin. Harder to explain. Chomsky, the German Dieter Nuhr, ... . A form of imprinting? )
Thanks Mark. I think you've my question right.
I've not read Chomsky or Dieter Nuhr on this so I'll have a look.
Chomsky is very, very old now and as always: "war wrong and USofA to blame" (which sometimes does fit). Dieter Nuhr is a German comedian (politics, stand-up and TV), co-founded the Green party, left them, dislikes Greta Th. - so neither woke nor QAnon. Still he signed now a letter to our government, not to send heavier weapons to Ukraine. Because: peace/not provoking WW3. What I consider a Putin-troll-position, shared only by the ignorant sort of pacifists. Do I have to update? I updated 1938. :/ As a good boy, I should listen, at least. Just to confirm my bias.
Maybe they got so used to taking the contrarian position, they're doing the opposite of the mainstream by reflex? Something like "Everybody's saying X, so I have to say Y just so the public discourse is being kept as diverse as possible".
Either that or just plain paid to say so. Nobody can say it's paranoia anymore, after looking at Schroder. If we have a former chancellor publicly choosing Russia's job, statistically there pretty much have to be lots of less preeminent others doing the same.
Gerhard Schröder was like Bill. C.: always laser-focused on the economy and the ladies. A German ex-chancellor will not get rich by selling his biography or giving speeches. So when Putin offered him a job in 2005 - that made Schröder 20 mln. richer by now, I can understand. - That NYT article was actually good. No new insights, realy. - I felt shocked and angry in 2005, but in hindsight I am glad it was publicly, at least. (And Merkel was in charge all those 16 years.) Putin is smart: why buy an aircraft-carrier, when western politicians come so much cheaper! Le Pen. Anti-frackers. Salvini. AfD. https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/23/world/europe/schroder-germany-russia-gas-ukraine-war-energy.html - Sorry, Scott! As the WP, the NYT is usu. a dark force. Schröder was just too vain to not give the NYT an interview. He had turned down all lesser papers.
Is there a way to view the Substack archive in the order the posts were published (or just any way remotely more convenient than the standard option)? I am just about caught up on SSC, and scrolling through the whole ACT archive to start from the beginning seems a little ineffective.
Heh, I was just about to ask that when I saw this — like, formed the exact same intention within about 60 seconds of coincidentally seeing this comment.
I don't know, I thought it was cool...
I think that https://astralcodexten.substack.com/archive?sort=new is in the (reverse) order of publishing.
Have you tried Feedly?
I hadn't, thanks! It seems to cut it.
Political Gridlock in the United States
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/how-much-longer-can-this-era-of-political-gridlock-last/
My view of politics in the United States is that the country is fairly evenly divided into two groups: Republicans and Democrats. Each group considers the other group to be a threat to the nation, and their most important political goal is to stop the other group from succeeding.
Now in my mind this is a recipe for failure of the United States. I believe the two-party system is the true threat to the nation.
I have been thinking about this a lot and devising a possible solution. The sad irony is that given our political stalemate, the solution is impossible to implement. But if you are willing to imagine the best possible electoral system for the United States (not just the puny changes currently possible), please read this proposal and share your thoughts with me.
Bit.ly/RealElectors
Approximately all of the American people in the world we live in today, would look on that system and say "this is a *TRAP*, it has been set by [evil other party] to divide and conquer the beleaguered coalition that is our last, best hope for goodness. The only way we can prevail is to remain faithful to the one true [good party] and not be fooled into wasting our votes on one of the splinter factions set out to tempt us with false promises. Our trusted leaders will tell us which candidates/electors/whatever constitute the one true [good party]".
A system like you describe *might* have prevented the American electorate from becoming as polarized as it presently is, but it won't depolarize it.
John, I'm sorry I didn't see your comment until a few days ago. HOW we move from what we have to something quite different is an unanswered question. My gut feeling is that some period of turmoil would precede it.
What we need is for aliens to land on the moon, then they can be the enemy rather than the other party.
New York City. Giant Psychic Squid. Accept no substitutes.
"Appreciate your recent support and hope world survives long enough for this to reach you, but tanks are in East Berlin, and writing is on wall."
I don't think this proposal has any value at all, because it misunderstands the dynamics that caused the two party system to come into existence in the first place. It seems to imagine that the two parties exist because the population is split into two groups. It therefore proposes that through a clever electoral system, it could divide up the population into many different groups, and the outcome would therefore be a much more diverse Congress.
This logic fails in two places.
(1) American voters don't decide their identity based on the mechanics of how elections work. Those identities are much broader, and come from the media, family socialisation, broad understandings of history, etc. Therefore you can't manipulate political identity simply by tinkering with the electoral system.
(2) The processes that lead to the formation of two parties is not a binary split in the population. The causation runs the other way. The binary split in the population emerges because of the binary split in Congress. And the binary split in Congress emerges because politics is very complicated, most legislation requires a 51% vote to get through Congress, so rather than try to understand the complexities of everyone's position, people form up into two rough groupings each representing about 50% of legislators.
The two-party system is a natural emergent property of a legislative body that uses majority voting; and in fact is a natural emergent property of pretty much any political system. You can't change that with fancy voting systems alone.
Maybe I'm misunderstanding you, but it looks like your point #2 contradicts point #1. I agree with point 2, that our electoral system created the binary split in the population. But point 1 seems to say that sort of thing can't happen.
Yeah, I didn't put that clearly enough. What I meant was: lots and lots of factors combine to create the binary split. That includes the media, education, social identities, interacting with the majority-rule mechanism within the legislature (or more generally, within government). The process by which legislators are selected is not a very important factor.
As evidence, look at countries with proportional representation, where you get lots more political parties, each with their specialist focus; but you still get a split into two broad camps, left and right. A diverse mechanism of legislator selection does not change the basis two-way split dynamic. Germany gets gridlock, too!
(It's possible that the German system is better than the American system; but if it is, that's not because Germany doesn't have a left and a right wing.)
It's not clear to me this would actually decrease the amount of polarization in our society, or the power of parties.
Just to take myself - currently I am a Democrat, and I would sign up for the electoral group that is closest to "we're the successor to the Democratic party" (both ideologically, and in terms of size). I imagine many others would do the same and you'd end up with two large electoral groups, except now by eliminating direct elections for anything and limiting group-switching to certain times, you've strengthened the leadership of the groups.
As for why I'd do that - you mention the idea of a pro-union group, that would have strong pro-union ideals but not necessarily any predetermined views on other stuff. It's exactly this reason I would NOT vote for a group like that. I would feel like I am throwing away my influence on any other issue. I want my views to be reflected in my representatives, I don't want someone who will reflect a narrow subset of my views and roll the dice on the rest.
Now you might have a situation where e.g. instead of a "Democratic Party" group you had 3 subgroups, something like "moderate Democrat", "liberal" and "woke progressive" and perhaps I'd vote for the middle one. But similar basic idea, and I'd expect the three to generally vote as a bloc for President, and form a bloc in Congress. In that case I think it's not so different from Israel or the UK, except there switching is easier, and UK is also (like the US now) geography-based.
It's also not clear to me in this system how the groups choose their leadership, or if it's left totally up to them.
I fixed it so that you could switch groups every year. Thanks for the feedback.
How many times in your life have you wanted to switch to another party?
Current "political groups":
Conservative
Constitution
Democrat (90 million)
Green (1.5 million)
Independent (120 million)
Liberal
Libertarian (5 million)
MAGA
Progressive
Reform
Republican (75 million)
Socialist
Why can't we 120 million independents, form a third party?
No problem in my proposal. "Independent" is one of the suggested groups.
Because you have 120 million incompatible ideas about what that party would do, and at least 110 million of you would defect in one way or another as soon as that became clear.
Thank you for your lengthy reply. I'll try to address everything, but it will take more than one reply. Here is the list of sugested groups, but you can add more.
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1ZSpytM0QJ8fjx4NOTTiCFvgX0RX7KSH1bp5bptfcSfg/
The list of suggested groups doesn't change anything that I said. I don't know if these groups would have significant membership or not, but either way I'm likely to be in the largest left-of-center group that's the successor to the Democratic Party, and have no interest in the others. Also to answer your question, none.
I actually think that you should look at what Israel's system is, it is similar in some ways to what you are proposing. Parties run slates of candidates for office, people vote for parties instead of individuals, and parties gain seats in their Parliament (the Knesset) proportionally to the number of votes.
So if I am in charge of a party ("The Sorensenists"), I publish the list of people we want to send to the Knesset - number 1 is me, number 2 is Bill Sorensen, number 3 is Jane Sorensen, etc. Then if the Sorensenists get 10% of the vote, they get 10% of the seats, which is 12 seats, and the first 12 people on the list go to the Knesset. Whoever can get 61 votes of the 120 in the Knesset to be the Prime Minister, is the Prime Minister.
It is similar to your proposal in that people vote for parties, not people. Different in that you vote for a party on election day, you don't sign up to support them in advance. Also different in that it's a Prime Minister not a President.
And it does have the effect of reducing the power of parties, and definitely doesn't result in a two party system.
Having electors and direct voting is a huge difference. Now if your list of Sorensenists were electors not legislators, that would make the two systems comparable.
I really appreciate the dialogue. I will give you a detailed response later.
BTW one of the suggested groups is called "Democrats".
Yeah the effect on polarisation is only there if "center left" and "center right" sometimes work together, this makes it really hard to demonise them
Hmm, I started reading your thoughts, but didn't finish. IMHO our congress has given away it's power to the executive branch. Power means making decisions, and making decisions pisses some people off, so congress doesn't want to do that if they want to be reelected. Term limits would help with this... which I see you propose. Term limits in congress would be good, but I don't see congress voting for that. I think changing the constitution (Constitutional convention) is a can of worms that we really don't want to open at this point. So I'd like some idea as to how we get congress to take back it's power... I don't know how to do that.
Yes, I had a 12 year limit on serving in the unicameral congress.
But term limits actually reduce the power of a branch of government.
>>Power means making decisions, and making decisions pisses some people off, so congress doesn't want to do that if they want to be reelected. <<
Do you think professional electors would be less likely to punish legislators for tackling hard issues?
If things continue to get worse for the average American, you will receive a demonstration of a very effective idea- violence. We got to see the faintest whiff of a preview of what that might look like on Jan. 6th.
> Each group considers the other group to be a threat to the nation
Their loudest parts do, and their leadership when fundraising to the base.
Congress is dysfunctional. Remedies are all difficult, but the least difficult might be an Amendment to ban Senators from running for President.
Barack Obama
John F. Kennedy
Warren G. Harding
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_presidents_of_the_United_States_by_other_offices_held
Three sitting Senators have been elected POTUS. You wish these men had not been President?
That seems like an odd line to draw. I just looked up the list of former Senators who became President, and it doesn't seem like an especially bad list. Mostly pretty middle of the road with one or two exceptions in either direction
It's not that the people who became Senators were bad. It's that people doing performative stuff in the Senate to plan for a Presidential run is part of Congress being dysfunctional.
What was some of the performative stuff that Kennedy and Obama did that worries you?
Three Senators in over 200 years. That doesn't seem like a concern.
Three *sitting* senators. 17 former senators have gone on to become president in total. Many more have *attempted* to become president. The problem with senators running for president, as Edward Scissorhands said, is not that they make bad presidents but that being focused on their future presidential ambitions makes them bad senators. Whether those ambitions ever come to fruition or not is irrelevant to the impact on their time in the Senate.
And what if their Senate experience made them better Presidents? I'd make that trade-off any day
So three plus some unknown number of "bad" Senators in more than two centuries. That sure doesn't motivate me to pass a constitutional amendment.
I'm still waiting for examples of what JFK and Obama did related to presidential ambitions that made them bad Senators.
Lots of stuff gets passed in Congress, even now. The issue is that both parties have large enough contingents of what the other side (and much of the middle) considers "crazies" who demand truly unpalatable things. So Congress doesn't pass those things, and a lot more of the political commentary and discussion is about those things. Passing the biggest entitlements package in American history (bigger than the New Deal) with a 50/50 Senate is not a reasonable expectation. Even a 60/40 Senate should have backed down from that kind of massive rearranging of society. Similarly, scrapping the ACA with no replacement and no plan was not going to happen either.
Both parties use the opposition of the other party to rile up votes, while generally not actually wanting to pass much if any of the legislation that fails. Stuff that the parties truly want, generally make it through. It's not a healthy situation, because it leaves large groups of Americans with the impression that their legislation goals are actually reasonable, if not for that pesky opposition. Unrealistic goals should be identified as such and shot down within the party that's trying to bring it up, but that makes some voters mad and therefore politicians are reluctant to do that. That's the real issue, not that Congress is "gridlocked" or can't pass anything.
Could Congress pass universal health care? Most of the world considers UHC to be an excellent idea.
Several blue states tried and failed. The devil is in the details.
I am doubtful, but find myself more than sympathetic to the side of Congress that would keep it from passing (which also includes a good number of Democrats). There are issues in the US system that seem sufficiently different from most of the rest of the world that a universal system would likely work less well or be more expensive, or both. I am quite skeptical that a universal system would work as intended, within our current system.
I do agree that healthcare in the US is all kinds of messed up, but that seems well beyond the scope of UHC-fixable problems, while introducing a different set of problems.
Could you talk a little more about the issues you think are extremely different in the US compared to the rest of the world?
That is, if I could wave a magic wand and replace every single element of the US healthcare system with a UK-style NHS system, is your view that the new NHS-in-US system would collapse because of US-specific factors? Or is it more that the historical path to creating a universal system couldn't be followed in the US because it has fallen into a suboptimal institutional equilibrium?
I could see a couple of elements of US-specific factors that could be important - you have a generally less healthy population than Europe and the market dynamics of pharmaceutical companies are heavily embedded in a US-style system (such that I could see an argument that pharma innovation would stagnate if I waved the hypothetical magic wand). But I can't really think of anything that would make me as confident as you that it is impossible (although I accept you are only modestly confident anyway!)
It sounds like you and I are aware of the same factors. "Suboptimal institutional equilibrium" is a good term for the biggest factor, in my mind. I wouldn't say the problems are unfixable, but I do feel strongly that switching to a UHC system will not automatically fix it and will therefore start out under the same suboptimal conditions we already have. I feel like the left-leaning states that tried to set up a UHC system and failed ran squarely into those problems, and the verdict was "completely unworkable" and then scrapping the attempt. California's plan would have cost something like 2X+ their entire state budget to implement (tripling the budget or more) and was clearly not workable.
I also agree about Americans being generally less healthy and that pharmaceutical situation that would be smaller but still significant issues.
That no state has successfully implemented UHC I consider beside the point. UHC needs the financial and political clout of a national government.
"Now in my mind this is a recipe for failure of the United States. I believe the two-party system is the true threat to the nation."
The American republic has been politically stable for the last 157 years with a two party system. What makes that a problem now?
Monarchies are stable for centuries. Doesn't prove they're optimal or even good.
Gridlock is quite stable.
A plausible answer, although not one I'm well-informed enough to be confident in, might point at some combination of rising ideological polarisation, decline in ticket splitting, decline in local media and the corresponding nationalisation of what would previously have been local issues, decline in bipartisanship in the senate and congress (with associated unwillingness to cross party lines to pass legislation), and an increase in the number of people who say they would not want to marry or be friends with someone from the other party.
One step back from that, another plausible-but-unproven answer to why those things have changed recently is "the internet".
At a DSL thread https://www.datasecretslox.com/index.php/topic,6391.0.html
@no one special posted:
“ If he wants to become an electrician, that's wonderful! The only problem is... I have no idea how to help him do that! As a university-attender myself, I know advice and procedures on how to do that. And while it was kind of expected of me, I have my own questions about the value of it both on its own, and compared to the costs. But when he asks me how to become an electrician, well, I just don't know!”
Since at DSL I am banned at my own request till June I can’t respond there soon, I suppose I’ll and I ask others to pass on the info to DSL, thanks if you do:
@no one special,
The aptitude tests to be an apprentice electrician in most counties locals is similar to the test to be an apprentice plumber but typically the IBEW has additional tests for English language skills while the UA stresses arithmetic more, regardless being able to do multiple choice arithmetic problems very quickly will be the core of the tests, your son should throughly practice that, there will also be tests for “spatial relations” and “mechanical aptitude” and a little practice on those is good, but arithmetic is the most important.
For higher paying more urban counties a high school diploma is a requirement, a GED isn’t an acceptable substitute, so complete high school, or test out, but do not drop out. More rural locals will accept a GED, but a drug test will be required instead.
Some locals will just accept apprentices based on their scores on the tests but most will interview as well, at one Union local the question was “Who do you know?” but for others it was “Do you have a reliable car?”, and “Are you used to working outside lifting heavy things?”.
-Plumber
Done.
Thank you @Erusian
Christopher Mims's 'Keywords" column in this weekend's WSJ creeps me out.
It's about Apple building its own modems. That isn't the creepy part. But the phrasing Mims uses in describing the technology for "always-on smart glasses and augmented reality, more wearables with their own independent connection to cellular networks" and a "computer-generated reality atop the real world" that gets me.
A new, improved version of reality will be overlaid on the natural world. How clever.
Isn't it bad enough that perceptions of public reality are systemically and professionally manufactured by those with the deepest pockets? Now some want to escape biological consciousness altogether. Alcohol, designer drugs and ridiculously video-gaming aren't enough escape.
Isn't putting on a headset in a gravity-free recliner with some kind of lens projecting 'augmented reality' into your eyes a bit narcissistic? I mean, there could be a cute-looking girl next door who's equally desperate.
"Now some want to escape biological consciousness altogether." What exactly is the problem with this outside of the naturalistic ick factor? Evolution is pretty much a Lovecraftian deity, its details tend to be terrifying when inspected - those who want to escape its grasp should be able to.
As a so-called Boomer, I have to complain that some, like Jimi Hendrix, weren't more firmly tethered to reality. We've seen this movie before.
After 6 years of chronic illness, I can confirm that the biggest high is to be straight.
Well, I've seen a James Cameron movie about AI misalignment once, doesn't mean it's not a serious topic tbqh...
I don't see how VR is "escaping consciousness" any more than reading a book is. Your consciousness is, well, whatever you're consciously experiencing, whether that's text on a page, images on a headset, or yes, a cute girl next door.
Also, augmented reality isn't the same thing as virtual reality. It's almost the opposite, really - it's technology that requires people to go outside and look at things (and perhaps meet a cute girl who's out doing the same) to gain its benefit. AR is stuff like Google Glass or Pokemon Go.
https://youtu.be/s-kdRdzxdZQ
You could make this kind of argument about any sort of life-improving intervention. Eating fancy food made from *recipes*, with *spices* and shit? What, venison and tubers weren't enough to escape? There could be a cute girl in the next tribe over out hunting right now!
That said, the point about letting certain people increasingly define reality for one's self and the rest of the normie masses is somewhat worrying, yes.
But while spices are pretty good, I feel that the assumption that internet has led to an improvement in the quality of life is less clear cut
Venison? I'm just sayin if consciousness is so bad, why not fix the context or approach, rather than do a swan dive into lala land? If we just give up on the mess we've created, and try and walk away, we'll turn into a bunch of self-focused, isolated escapists in a neglected, abandoned landscape.
I know, and I'm not saying you don't have a point — I just mean that whether it's escapism or a simple QoL improvement depends on where you stand.
Point well made. If one is fleeing warfare after hiding for weeks in a basement shelter, an out-of-body electronic escape just might save her or him from a breakdown.
Some 'shrooms might help, as well.
MAXIMUM NEGATIVE STATMENT! I DON'T BELIEVE THIS!
But if you can't object to this without a "NuhUh!", then it's a hard argument to make.
This assumes some sort of value in the experience of the "real" world, which I would posit there isn't.
I mean, what's your other option? Driving around your McCity in your McCar with your McFamily, having McExperiences?
If you go into the jungle and live as a caveman for five years, you re still doing it in a McContext, so who gives a shit, right?
Depending on where we are drawing lines, living in "reality" is how you justify your existence in a world of scarcity.
I.e. adding value to the shared computation/work that is society and and the economy, via virtual or real means, but not the void of escapism that simulated realities may represent
You could also try living authentically, I suppose, but that might be difficult with your attitude.
It's easy for me, because I'm autistic.
I just do what I want and think what I want about it; and part of that assumption is that whatever I do is an Authentic Real Experience (tm) or Authentic Real Thought(tm) by way of me not giving a shit, and everyone else is doing some sort of weird internal status game bullshit or likewise not giving a shit.
This is staggeringly arrogant and cannot be defended. I am also 100% sure it's true.
Basically: If you give a shit about something being authentic, real, narcissistic, etc: It is impossible for you to not enact those worries.
It's one of those annoying "the only way to have a thing is to not want it" style of problems.
For example: I am entertaining myself during a meeting by typing this up. I don't actual care if you read it or agree, beyond the pleasure interacting with people brings me.
Even if you never see this, it's fine, because I'm writing it for myself. To kill time while running my brain in neutral, so to speak.
You live in reality.
Hang on, what's reality? Suppose you're living in a simulation, whether on a computer, or in a demon's imagination. Or maybe you're basically god, and this is all your imagination, following strictly-defined rules.
Reality is whatever you exist in. So that's a bit circular. Rather, let us observe that reality is the context in which we exist.
If you live in VR, is that less legitimate? Well, supposing you live in a simulation, then making another simulation inside the simulation a major part of your context doesn't really change much, does it? Except insofar as somebody attaches meaning to -this- context and not -that- context, which, once we notice that meaning-attachment is itself subjective - it's just deciding one version of the context is better than another version of the context - ends up not cashing out to anything.
Okay, so, we live in the context we live in, and the context we live in can be modified; I enjoy a context which is slightly cooler than what somebody else might term "reality", so I have air conditioning. A more authentic experience seems, here, to cash out to being slightly miserable on a perpetual basis.
That's kind of where your response ends up cashing out for most people; that you want them to live without the things that make their lives less miserable. Basically, on some level, so they're motivated to make their now-more-miserable-lives less miserable in a context which you approve of.
Now, I'm sure you actually have a "deep" meaning for what "authentic" means, but the thing is, "authentic" doesn't mean the same things to every person. And for some people, "authentic" involves some extremely anti-social behavior. Go watch Poker Night, although it's an absolutely terrible, no-fun-even-to-make-fun-of movie; you can stop when you see the sticky note on the wall, detailing the villain's goals. That, right there, is what authenticity means. Also the smile of a child seeing a butterfly for the first time, granted - but the juxtaposition of those things kind of just makes authenticity worse, not better.
Now, it's entirely possible that's not what you mean at all. But in that case, I am going to assert that your version of authenticity is basically another McLifestyle.
I think your label of "McLifestyle" is ill-defined, then.
If you live in VR, that is less legitimate because it is a shallow simulacrum. You are limited by the rules of that world, and ignore the deeper rules lying underneath. All your struggles are in an imaginary, limited context - you have no way to change the paradigm because you're too invested in the paradigm, and the paradigm was set by someone else anyway, probably a corp that wants to profit from you. There is so much value you leave on the table, because you cannot perceive most of opportunities around you (much like OP's girl next door). If the VR ever fails you'll be ejected into a real world you can no longer navigate. There are physical needs you must attend to, supported by an economy and society you can no longer engage in.
I wouldn't say there is anything inauthentic in living with air conditioning, but there is something inauthentic in forgetting air conditioning is a thing, assuming air conditioning will always be present wherever you go, and in refusing to go outside because there's no air conditioning there, regardless of potential gain.
If you live in the real world, that is less legitimate because it is the result of chance rather than choice. You are limited by the rules of the world, and ignore the deeper rules of autonomy. All your struggles are in a limited, arbitrary context - you have no way to change the paradigm because you're too invested in the paradigm, and the paradigm was set by reality itself, which doesn't care about your happiness or survival at all. There is so much value you leave on the table, because you cannot perceive most of opportunities around you (like a VR girlfriend). As the rest of the world moves into VR, you'll be late to a virtual world you never learned to navigate. There are virtual requirements you will need to attend to, supported by a virtual context you cannot engage in.
Bold to assume that humanity will actually be able to mass-retreat into the Oasis.
It's all in the Dick Tracy glasses; we'll use old 5G smart phones for tying our shoelaces.
There have been several comments here in the last few weeks explaining why nuclear war is unlikely to literally kill everyone.
To what extent is this because of arms controls treaties? What fraction of the human population would be killed if a full-scale nuclear war broke out today, compared to if a full-scale nuclear war broke out in the late 1980s when nuclear stockpiles were at their largest?
If these two numbers are significantly different from each other, then nuclear arms control treaties need to be celebrated a lot more.
It's complicated. Of course the fact that there are now ~3,000 warheads instead of ~30,000 or more means significantly less loss of life and ecological damage, although what we've got left is still plenty to do terrible things.
When the most significant of those treaties (START I) was hammered into final form in 1990-91 the world had just changed enormously -- the Wall had come down the year before, and the USSR was about to go out of existence -- and most people thought there was hardly any need for nuclear weapons at all. So the reduction by ~75% or so wasn't greated with joy at the time, because it seemed if anything too timid.
Now we live in a different world, of course, and yes it would make some kind of sense for us to be grateful for the fact that Reagan, Bush Sr, and M. Gorbacheve left us with way fewer weapons than were around in 1985 (and subsequent efforts led to still more reductions), although one would also expect the more aggressive and fearful demographics in both the US and Russia being more annoyed than grateful.
The sad fact is that the utility of a treaty that reduces nuclear weapons to any number greater than zero (or close to it) is always kind of marginal and unsatisfying, sort of a lesser of two evils kind of thing, because if the event of war you still get a pretty horrific level of destruction.
Ukraine did cut back to zero. Seems in "the event of war you still get a pretty horrific level of destruction". - I much prefer a world with a few hundred warheads to one without any. Turned out safer and more peaceful - in the mean. N: years since 1945. (Sure, we have a around ten thousand now, suboptimal, but still better than zero, I'd say.)
>I much prefer a world with a few hundred warheads to one without any. Turned out safer and more peaceful
In hindsight, yes. And the fact that we've made it 70-80 years without a nuclear war doesn't mean there won't be one in the next 100.
An interesting speculation. However there is unfortunately no empirical evidence at all that the number of nuclear wars scales with the number of nuclear weapons, since the domain here is [0,30000] roughtly and the range is [0,0]. Difficult to draw a straight line through that data.
Indeed, there is a certain amount of evidence to the contrary -- more precisely, there is some historical evidence that the number of wars scales inversely with the number of nuclear weapons, if you extend your data plot back to, say, 1914. The number of wars, both large and small, has fallen significantly since the invention of the atomic bomb.
Also, I'm pretty sure the Ukrainians bitterly regret cutting back their number of nukes to zero. Had they kept even 5, sufficient to wipe out Moscow, we can be pretty confident neither the 2014 nor the current invasion would have taken place.
If cutting the number of warheads in half would save hundreds of millions of lives in the case of a nuclear war, then I don't think that's marginal.
I agree that there is not nearly as much popular support for arms control treaties now as there was in 1990-91. But maybe we could increase support if we publicized what (potential) good they've done more.
Sure, and someone who lives in DC or Seattle, and would be very likely to die even in a "small" nuclear war, could console himself with the fact that people in rural Kentucky will now be spared -- but you can see how that is in the "silver lining" not "huzzah!" category.
Edit: I don't want to add to the usual nuclear hysteria by saying this, though. I don't think the destruction that would be visited on the US in an all-out nuclear war with Russia would even be as bad, proportionately, as what Japan or Germany suffered during the Second World War. Ordinary TNT is darn destructive, too, when you use enough of it. But destruction on that scale has rarely been seen, and most of those who have witnessed it firsthand are now gone. It's not clear as nations and peoples we have any kind of good instincts in understanding it -- understanding what it's really like, and what kinds of risks we are willing to take for our aims that balance it. I don't think the answer is "no risk at all" or "any risk" but I increasingly doubt the ability of the present generations to suss it out rationally -- because the real-world experience of war at that level is gone, or nearly gone, from living memory.
I mean, Vladimir Putin is kind of Exhibit A. I doubt very much any Soviet leader after Stalin would consider what he can achieve in the Ukraine at this point worth even a small risk of Russian civilization and culture being obliterated -- and yet he continue to toss around casually the threat of nuclear war, which is either insane or insincere, and either one is a disgrace to his position.
Even Stalin would not, I think, risk nuclear war over Putin's pathetic currently achievable war aims. Stalin would have disdained the picayune, dreamed much larger, and probably *would* have been willing to have a nuclear war over control over the entirety of Europe. But not over just the Donbas plus Crimea, I think, or even the whole of Ukraine.
There was and is zero "risk of Russia(n civilization and culture)* being obliterated" by Putins invasion-turned-debacle. Before the invasion NATO governments all loudly said, they would not go to (even conventional) war over Ukraine. Very much "peace in our time"-like. (*Putin seems to be working hard on obliterating both, though.)
If Putin resorted to tactical nukes, that would all change. I don't think we should go war over Russia using tactical nukes against Ukraine, but the nuclear taboo is such that even the coolest heads would be lost in such a scenario. I think its very unlikely Putin would use tactical nukes, but I thought it was very unlikely he would be foolish enough to invade Ukraine in the first place, so who knows.
Dream on. Joe Biden doesn't have that much longer to live, and he really doesn't like the Russians, never has. He's just about senile enough to push the loud button if given modest provocation, and Putin is just stupid enough to supply it. Between the two of these goofballs the risk is much further above zero than it should be.
Nuclear arms control treaties, and the end of the cold-war alliance structure where almost every nation was a likely target, have probably reduced the expected death toll in an all-out nuclear war by a billion or more people. But there wasn't a risk of literal human extinction even at Peak Cold War; neither global fallout nor nuclear winter would render the whole of the Earth's surface uninhabitable, and there would have been many, many towns full of people that didn't see so much as a mushroom cloud on the horizon.
Then and now, the biggest factor is probably that disruption of the world's industrial economy would greatly reduce the scale of industrialized agriculture, and without e.g. industrial-scale fertilizer production, much less food will be grown. So there's probably going to be famine. But there's also going to be a whole lot of farmland, most of it really, that isn't blasted, burned, irradiated, or frozen to any great degree. Whatever food can be grown on that land without trainloads of fertilizer, etc, would feed surviving humans.
In the modern era, destruction won't be so total as to shut down all the world's big fertilizer plants. With Cold War arsenals, you'd deliberately target(*) those if only because they can easily be repurposed to build explosives, and you don't want people you don't trust to be mass-producing explosives in a World War. And with ten thousand megaton-scale warheads, you don't have to. With only one thousand warheads and those sub-megaton, fertilizer plants won't be deliberately targeted and are less likely to be incidentally blown up or have their necessary supporting infrastructure destroyed.
* in the sense of "double-check that it's in the blast radius of some warhead assigned to that general area", not "make it ground zero"
what I’m not sure if I udnerstand is the affect that supply chains have on all of this. suppose that the US, Russia and/or China get in a nuclear war, but Kansas is perfectly fine because why would you nuke Kansas. so the farmers get on their combines to harvest the wheat. except wait, their isn’t any fuel because most of the major refineries were hit. and even if there was once your equipment broke there is no way it gets fixed because all the parts would have to be shipped through a coastal port, of which there are few left— and those that are are probablly being used to ship essential supplies for what remains of the miitary. and, if the war invovled anti satalite missles or people intentionally cutting fiber optic cables under the ocean, which would make stratgic sense, its possible you couldn’t even get on the internet to order supplies in the first palce. basically, your community could only survive if you had the ability to farm by hand (since even if you can generaate electricity to power things good luck repalcing your batteries when they die) with whatever tools you could make from the scrap metal around you.
like, I guess maybe people in less develped parts of the world, where this type of farming is only a few generations in the past, would be fine, but I don’t see many north Americans being able to become fully self sufficent in that way.
Note that Americans produce roughly twice as much food as they need, so there's plenty of slack in the system. If the result of World War III is that three hundred million people starve for lack of American-grown food, it won't be Americans who starve.
Note also that farmers are not narrowly-specialized automatons who can only farm the one way they presently do. If they don't have nitrate fertilizer, they still have the old textbooks from A&M that explain how to use manure and four-course crop rotation. If the oil refineries are all gone, then they know how to turn some of their crops into biodiesel so that they can get the rest to harvest and to market. And they know how to fix tractors without OEM parts if they have to. Well, OK, not every one of them knows all of that, but they know a guy who knows a guy.
They'll muddle through, and most of the rest of us will too.
A lot of the tractors might be remotely bricked by John Deere because the license server is offline.
I think farmers are pretty adaptable so I lean more in your direction but we're making some deliberately pro-fragile decisions on key infrastructure.
Cell service is far from universal in rural areas; there has to be some mechanism already in place to allow for tractor use without an internet connection.
It would certainly reduce the general technology level by one or two steps, but the technology to build tractors has existed for quite a long time now, such that individual farms have the necessary technical capacity to repair their own equipment, and certainly regional hubs (which could be towns in the mid to low 1,000s population) could have the necessary resources and capabilities to produce new tractors and such. John Deere has major manufacturing in Waterloo Iowa, population ~67k. I'm not sure that Des Moines (215k) would be a nuclear target, and probably nothing else in Iowa either. Large cities aren't the center of manufacturing that they once were, such that tractors, oil/gas, and other farming implements are not really made in those high-target zones. Financial institutions will be very badly hit, which would cause a lot of organizational problems with how to recover.
The bigger issue would be political stability. If the post-nuclear population is breaking down into Mad Max-style roving bands, then forget about a population sustaining farming. If the people maintain communities and get to rebuilding, then it will not be a disaster in terms of humanity surviving, even though billions may die.
Putting very rough numbers on my interpretation of what you've said. A full scale nuclear war would have killed maybe 50% of the world's population in 1980, but only maybe 20% of the world's population today. These numbers are obviously very uncertain, but do you think they're wildly off?
It sounds as though one of the best ways to limit the damage of a nuclear war is to have farmers store several years worth of fertilizer on their farms. This is also something that doesn't look very provocative to other nuclear powers. Do you know if anyone has thought about this strategy?
The numbers are I think right-ish. And the concept of "prepping" key industries including agriculture is definitely valid and something an enlightened society that shares a planet with Vladimir Putin should consider. Though as Mr. Doolittle notes, huge piles of fertilizer are problematic (for several reasons, but explodiness will do for a start).
Fertilizer is explosive, so that's probably not a good idea. The small chance of that mattering in a nuclear disaster seems like a poor reason to create a situation where multiple farms have major explosions every year.
There are a lot of moving parts other than the total megatonnage or number of warheads, and stockpiles would have shrunk somewhat even without the various arms limitation treaties.
Targets in particular are easy to change in response to strategic, political or doctrinal realities. Beyond countervalue vs counterforce targeting, there is the decision about whether the marginal warhead gets dropped on an area that has already been wiped off the map.
https://twitter.com/MarkLutter/status/1520510178214383617
> EA has been hugely influential in shaping AI
Is this true? I know a large number of EA supporters are also AI researchers, but it's unclear that EA itself has any impact. The only argument I can see is that maybe OpenAI not releasing GPT-2's weights was inspired by AI safety ideology, but it's unclear that that action itself was hugely influential. Anyone know what this tweet could be referring to specifically?
It's twitter, so...it's almost certainly bullshit.
There's actually a lot of very useful ML discussion on Twitter.
Not just GPT-2. DALL-E is being held much more closely as well. If the impact is a shift in cultural attitudes that could be much stronger than legal measures. Like how the "friends don't let friends drive drunk" campaign worked.
Sure, but again I don't actually think keeping your stuff closed source counts as "hugely influential." The open source replications lag by a year or two, but research progress-wise it's not clear that it has any impact (since the other orgs can train their own huge LM's/image models etc., and would even if the models were released).
I agree that it's not going to stop anything, but it's sand in the gears. If some of the biggest, most advanced teams stop talking to one another you lose the multiplicative effects cooperation brings. It's not just "they'll catch up to the closed teams". It's that the closed teams would themselves benefit from making this into an open conversation and would be expected to accelerate progress all around.
But everyone publishes their methods still, so the barrier to reproduction isn't knowledge but just GPU/engineer hours. I think the EA->OpenAI's behavior connection is tenuous (not releasing their models is coincidentally also good for profit), and the assertion that it has strongly impacted research progress is untrue.
I'll take your word for it, since this isn't my field. I'm just arguing that a cultural shift can have as strong an impact on a field as a legislative one. It sounds like you're not convinced there has been a meaningful cultural shift. Or at least that any shift hasn't impacted behavior so much as established financial/strategic incentives.
You're definitely right that that's a possibility. If the tweet is correct, that's why it's so. The reason I was surprised was due to the fact that it's my area of research, and any influence on the researchers I follow/read isn't clear to me.
It's crazy to me how the lab-leak theory has not permeated 'normie' circles. No one knows who Peter Daszek is, that Fauci has been in office for almost 40 years, or that the lead bioethicist of the NIH is his wife.
As a self sanity test: In a more sane world these people are on trial/investigation, no?
I welcome disagreements.
Most people I know (all significantly more normie than me) are aware of the idea that it came from a lab. They vary dramatically in how probable they think it is (which is mostly correlated with what news content they consume most.) The ones who stay abreast of news via their facebook feed seem particularly pro-lab-leak-theory.
It seems to me that on net the evidence is against the lab leak. I used to be fairly pro lab-leak (after all, what are the odds that there's a lab working on bat coronaviruses in the same city as an outbreak?) but I've updated based on a few things:
* Some of the evidence that leaned pro leak at first (eg. that the animals the Chinese tested at the wetmarket were all COVID negative) ended up being fabricated (they first removed all exotic animals from the wet market, denied they were ever there, and then tested some standard livestock that wouldn't have it anyhow.)
* Bats with a closer ancestor of COVID than had been previously known (publically at least!) have been found within a couple hundred miles of Hunan
* There's a fairly strong epidemiological case against the lab leak (and pro-wet-market) based on the locations of the first known cases and clusters. There really doesn't seem to be an early cluster in the lab part of the city.
* We have actual positive COVID samples from the environment of the wetmarket where the exotic animals were kept.
All the sordid who's-kissing-whose-butt-in-washington doesn't weigh in much for me, because it's just as strong of evidence for 'our government is quietly corrupt and our elites are all rather good pals' (which is a much simpler explanation that any specific conspiracy theory.)
All told, I give the lab leak 10-15% chance of being true. It's not impossible or even implausible... but it doesn't have the preponderance of the evidence.
Do you have sources for those first two bullet points? I've been following the issue fairly closely, and I haven't seen those yet.
They were in some discussion I was reading back in February when the big epidemiological paper came out. I'll try to find the sources.
Re the first cluster of cases: Did you know there are (were) two labs in Wuhan, there is (was?) some smaller lab that was located very close to the wet market, right along the river were the first cluster of cases occurred. I was reading a lot about the lab leak idea in the spring/summer of 2020... but I've mostly stopped, because 'what's the point?'
No, I haven't heard this wrinkle. Do you know the name of this lab so I can look it up?
I doubt they were working on SARS-related coronaviruses there, or I'm sure I'd have heard of it by now.
Hah OK I also found this again.
https://project-evidence.github.io/#%28part._whcdc%29
The second lab was called Wuhan Centre for Disease Control, sec. 8.6
I was deep into the lab leak idea for several months in 2020. :^)
Thank you for your diligent searching! You saved me a bunch of time. I'll read up on it.
Well there is not much more than circumstantial evidence. The narrative seems to be for a natural origin. Otherwise it somehow says that 'science' did something bad. And we can't have that because 'science is good'. (I've given up hope that we will ever learn the truth about the origin... well maybe in 20 years or so.)
Well there is not much more than circumstantial evidence. The narrative seems to be for a natural origin. Otherwise it somehow says that 'science' did something bad. And we can't have that because 'science is good'. (I've given up hope that we will ever learn the truth about the origin... well maybe in 20 years or so.)
Oh dear I was afraid you'd ask that. I went searching on google with a time limit of 3/2020 and 11/ 2020. I got some hits but a lot of the more wacko conspiracy stuff about china making a weaponized virus, I'll see if I can find anything sane. (There were links on an old usenet group.. maybe I can find that... hang on
OK here it is... 10 minute youtube video
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpQFCcSI0pU
(Note this is from about 4-5-2020.. that is at least when I first watched it.) Fast forward to ~ the 7 minute mark to see talk of the second wuhan lab with (perhaps) patient zero. Look not everything on this video is true... it was made early on in the pandemic.
No I have no idea where it came from. I'm just saying there is a 2nd lab that was linked with the outbreak and is near the seafood market. Maybe there was an energetic grad student working both places, IDK. I do recall when I say the nature article with the first cases, one of the maps had a blob along the river and I thought... isn't that near the 2nd lab? (And it is.)
Glad to disagree: A) Investigation - why not. Trial - if enough evidence. Can't see that in Fauci`s case. But do not care, really. - B) Was it a lab-leak? We do not have it on tape, so "Rationalists" should give probabilities. Some say 30% (just because it is Wuhan) , I thought 70-90% - as does Matt Ridley in "Viral" - but: expert Derek Lowe (on Scott's blogroll!) is near zero https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/gain-function . More relevant: economist Scott Sumners https://www.econlib.org/econlog-by-author-and-letter/?selected_letter=S#ssumner says what really matters is, such labs should never be placed in cities. But in deserts with tough isolation-regime. GoF should be banned till then. + we should better prepare. Where Covid came from, what does it really matter today or tomorrow? Horse bolted.
I was at 30%, but this thread caused me to update down to 1%. https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406170783502339
^ “It's crazy to me how the lab-leak theory has not permeated 'normie' circles.”
@saila,
I hope I qualify as a “normie”, FWLIW I’m not a college graduate (but my wife is) who has a blue collar job in San Francisco, and I have heard that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab.
^ “No one knows who Peter Daszek is,”
You got me, I don’t know of “Daszek”
^ “that Fauci has been in office for almost 40 years,”
Knew that
^ “or that the lead bioethicist of the NIH is his wife.”
Didn’t know, don’t know why I should care.
^ “As a self sanity test: In a more sane world these people are on trial/investigation, no?”
I’ve no idea why they should be, and you haven’t said.
^ “I welcome disagreements”
Well @saila, your cryptic “I’m angry about [thing] and [people] that other people don’t know about” message is pretty damn disagreeable and annoying, and doesn’t incline me to learn more from you, perhaps being more polite could help get whatever it is you want known to be better disseminated and make you seem less like a crank.
>I hope I qualify as a “normie”, FWLIW I’m not a college graduate (but my wife is) who has a blue collar job in San Francisco, and I have heard that COVID-19 may have escaped from a Chinese lab.
I believe my definition of normie maybe be very different from others, I believe most 'normies' have never heard of 'rationalism'. Certainly they don't read ASX or SSC.
>You got me, I don’t know of “Daszek”
CEO of EcoHealthAlliance, the research company which was had grants from NIH to study sars in Wuhan. Their research would be where the leak originated. If a lab-leak occurred, Daszek would be wrapped up in it.
>Didn’t know, don’t know why I should care.
Seems like a substantial conflict of interest?
>I’ve no idea why they should be, and you haven’t said.
This Vanity Fair article is good and well-sourced. (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy).
>Well @saila, your cryptic “I’m angry about [thing] and [people] that other people don’t know about” message is pretty damn disagreeable and annoying, and doesn’t incline me to learn more from you, perhaps being more polite could help get whatever it is you want known to be better disseminated and make you seem less like a crank.
Apologies. I only wanted to encourage informed discussion and clarify I would be willing to change my mind if presented with evidence. I thought I was more than polite, if a bit inflammatory (to encourage discussion).
100 percent agree with all of Plumber's responses.
I'll just add that literally every adult I am acquainted with, in my workplace and in the community where I live (in the U.S. Midwest), has heard of the lab-leak theory.
I personally think that when a lot of people say "Why isn't anyone talking about this?" they mean "Why isn't this the dominant narrative?" This is how the phrase is used in grievance studies and conspiracy theorist (but I repeat myself) circles, and I've rarely seen a case where the first is used without it becoming the second in any ensuring discussion.
Heh, spot-on.
That's probably because 'normie' is a dumb word that doesn't actually mean anything. There are plenty of non-rationalists and people who aren't permanently online that know about it, though, if that's what you're getting at.
No one knows who Peter Daszek is because normie is a dumb word?
Yeah good point. How about -Himaldr’s question, Sleazy E? Your post here has a really high sneer to content ratio. How about some more content?
I think the most plausible explanation of any of Fauci's inaccuracies is that he's embedded in the government bureaucracy. He has to be a team player.
Have you read this Vanity Fair article (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy)?
There are two things here. There is "do people think that the official story from the Chinese government in March 2020 on how COVID originated wasn't completely accurate", and I think that quite a lot of people agree with that. However, most of them have better things to do than argue about it.
There is separately "Fauci is secretly working with the Chinese" or whatever Fauci has to do with a lab-leak in China. That's probably "you shouldn't listen to Sean Hannity 3 hours per day, it's not good for your mental health".
I think it's reasonable to question Fauci's motives, given he was one of two people in the world with the authority to allow the GoF research in Wuhan to continue throughout the moratorium of 2014-2017, and that Wuhan got that authorization.
It's reasonable to say, "sure, but he didn't give that authorization knowing that the consequences would be a global pandemic!" But then, the whole point of the moratorium was because this kind of research is exactly the sort of thing that could lead to a pandemic. That was the point of the moratorium. So if Fauci subverted that moratorium and the result was a global pandemic, whose origin story he helped suppress, I can understand people being upset about that. That doesn't require Fauci to be "secretly working with the Chinese", just that he also has an interest in not going down in history as being obviously irresponsible with catastrophic global consequences.
Oh wait, are there still people pursuing the idea that COVID itself resulted from gain of function research? I’ve seen lots of arguments about whether gain of function research should be banned, and lots of arguments about whether wild virus was accidentally released at a food market or a research lab, and lots of arguments about whether gain of function research was being downplayed, but I hadn’t heard any claims that gain of function research was actually involved in COVID itself, except for one or two breathless connect-the-dots articles in summer 2020.
This Vanity Fair article is fairly well-sourced and contains the majority of that which worries me (https://www.vanityfair.com/news/2022/03/the-virus-hunting-nonprofit-at-the-center-of-the-lab-leak-controversy).
Yes, people are still following that idea. Probably peak "COVID came from Gain of Function Research at WIV" was in summer of 2021, not 2020, and while the discussion has faded somewhat it hasn't gone entirely away.
I'll be honest. I haven't followed it much since this article from May 21:
https://nicholaswade.medium.com/origin-of-covid-following-the-clues-6f03564c038
Since then I haven't heard any arguments that support the natural origin hypothesis (evidence like we saw with SARS1 and MERS, but which was conspicuously absent with SARS2). The most I've seen are arguments that the Shi lab released a token few of the many viruses they've been working on for genomics comparisons and - unsurprisingly - none of those unrelated viruses had genomes that were related to SARS2.
Like I said, though, I haven't followed this closely since became a subject that people are allowed to talk about again. Please point me to anything new that tilts the balance in favor of a natural origin, or at least away from a lab origin.
Ah right, that Wade article was from summer 21 not 20, but it’s the one I was thinking of. It claims to have evidence of features not shared with natural origin virus, but as I recall, its smoking gun evidence was exactly the same character as evidence that it pointedly rejects as irrelevant. (The smoking gun is supposed to be the furin cleavage site, that is different from anything known in its branch of the coronavirus family, but he rejects the relevance of the fact that the spine is unlike anything that has ever been known to be synthesized.)
The non-natural origin has had no new support since that Wade article, while there have been several bits of evidence for or against the wet market or the lab as the site of a natural release.
It's not a slam dunk, but this thread made me much more skeptical of the lab leak hypothesis. You might disregard the genealogy data if you think the virus was engineered anyway, but the rest still seems relevant.
https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406170783502339
I think these two papers make a strong case for the wet market as an early super spreader event, but it doesn't explain how a Laotian virus got into that market in the first place. Especially if, given what other reports are saying, Laos isn't a significant supplier of animals to China/Wuhan.
Just spent some time catching up. Looks like RaTG13 is no longer the closest relative to SARS2. Instead, it's this BANAL-52 strain they found down in Laos? How did it get from Laos to Wuhan? I can't tell if this thread is just a bunch of conspiracy theory connect-the-dots, or what:
https://twitter.com/gdemaneuf/status/1456514824813178886
But the grant application seems like something that should update your priors at least a little in favor of lab escape:
https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/21066966-defuse-proposal
Maybe it's some elaborate hoax? It almost sounds too on-the-nose to be true:
"We will analyze all SARSr-CoV S gene sequences for appropriately conserved proteolytic cleavage sites in S2 and for the presence of potential furin cleavage sites74,75. SARSr-CoV with mismatches in proteolytic cleavage sits can be activated by exogenous trypsin or cathepsin L. Where clear mismatches occur, we will introduce appropriate human specific cleavage sites and evaluate growth potential in Vero cells and HAE cultures. In SARS-CoV, we will ablate several of these sites based on pseudotyped particle studies and evaluate the impact of select SARSr-CoV S changes on virus replication and pathogenesis. We will also review deep sequence data for low abundant high risk SARSr-CoV that encode functional proteolytic cleavage sites, and if so, introduce these changes into the appropriate high abundant, low risk parental strain."
P.S. Do you know who Tim Leissner is? If not, why would you expect random people to be familiar with Peter Daszek? The world is a big place, and there's no way to even keep up with notable scandals, let alone speculative rumors.
Of course, a lot of people *did* hear about the lab leak theory when it was all over the news last year. It's just that noone found any solid evidence for it and people have more important things to worry about so the story didn't go anywhere.
What? Plenty of evidence has been found for it, unless by "solid evidence" you mean only "definitive proof."
Perhaps this is what OP is talking about.
What is the best evidence for it?
https://www.slowboring.com/p/im-not-convinced-by-the-new-lab-leak?s=r
> it would be an odd coincidence for a lab-leaked virus to have its first big super-spreading event at a live animal market, but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses. It’s a genuinely weird situation
> But you could also draw a map focused on the human cases that would have shown a cluster in the other corner. And certainly the evidence is all consistent with the theory that a human got the virus at the lab, brought it to the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market, and triggered a super-spreading event at the market (potentially infecting raccoon dogs along with humans).
I'm at less than 50% on lab leak myself, but it's quite possible.
Now do the pyramids and the speed of light.
I take this response as confirming that there is in fact no "solid evidence" for the theory..
> but it would also be an odd coincidence for a devastating zoonotic coronavirus plague to occur in a city that happened to host a lab doing research on coronaviruses
I think there's an innocent explanation for this one: the causality is the other way round. If you want to choose a site for your new coronavirus research lab, then in a city with a large live animal market and near some impressive bat caves is a good place so you can collect a lot of samples close by.
I thought the wet market hypothesis had been rejected:
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41598-021-91470-2
Or is the hypothesis that the wet markets were trading in SARS2-infected animals, but that this was in the absence of any bat or pangolin hosts?
Except that we know this isn't the reason the big Chinese virus lab is in Wuhan. It isn't near the bat caves, and it predates the wet market in question by decades. And it wasn't a *coronavirus* research, it was an every-sort-of-virus research lab.
Maybe it was set up in Wuhan because there were lots of other sorts of viruses running around there, but that still makes it a puzzling coincidence that it was so close to the epicenter of a bat-coronavirus pandemic.
To be fair, the bat caves were *not* near Wuhan. That being said, coincidences are not proof. They're maybe a reason to *start* an investigation, but if you're a year into your investigation and still have nothing beyond the original "hey there's a lab nearby, isn't that funny?" to show for it, that's a very bad look.
The whole thread started when I asked if there was any actual evidence, and the response has conspicuously been crickets.
I don’t have a link to Matt Yglesias’s post a few days later, but he liked Angela Rasmussen’s rebunking of his debunking.
https://mobile.twitter.com/angie_rasmussen/status/1499406170783502339
Why? They'd try to cover things up regardless of what the truth is. They might not even know the truth themselves. Keep in mind that China *also* tried to cover up SARS 1, which is very definitely zoonotic.
Do you also think that Trump's coverup and obstruction of the Russiagate investigation was a "slam-dunk admission of guilt" as well?
Also leave room for alternate hypotheses for why they might want to destroy a bunch of evidence - like that they were doing other stuff they didn't want the international community to know about. If you're cooking meth in your house and the police knock wanting to search for a fugitive, you don't want to let them in. But that doesn't mean you're harboring the fugitive.
It was *already* investigated, last year. (Remember when *the President* asked US intelligence to look into the matter?) Unless new evidence comes out, there's no reason to worry about it.
Would you feel comfortable applying the same rational to say, Watergate?
It was a gradual process that played out over a couple months in early 2021, as the lab leak theory became more and more popular. I think there were some pieces of evidence in late 2020 that fed the fire, and a big medium post in early 2021 that helped popularize it.
So what was it?
Okay, its a conspiracy theory. So what? Some conspiracy theories are true. Of course it's a conspiracy theory because we're theorizing a conspiracy has taken place. Disagree with the evidence for it, but pointing out that it is literally a conspiracy theory is not some silver bullet argument against it.
China have conspired to cover up the spread of the virus from day one, spread *conspiracy theories* about the virus originating in the US and the US government covering this up, and have prevented any proper investigation of its origins from being performed (and launched multi-billion dollar trade sanctions against Australia because their leader simply called for an independent investigation into the origins of the virus). It is trivially true that a conspiracy has taken place on the part of the Chinese government, the question is how far this goes, and whether the Chinese are covering up any wrongdoing on their part (such as lab leaks) or if they're simply paranoid enough to believe that the US/WHO were going to fabricate evidence to falsely implicate them in a lab leak. It's also trivially true that Peter Daszek has been extremely dishonest and deceptive.
I don't believe in the lab leak hypothesis, but dismissing it out of hand because it is a "conspiracy theory" is unfair and the claim that there's no evidence in its favor is dishonest or uninformed.
This "no evidence" claim is exactly what the Law of No Evidence (https://thezvi.substack.com/p/law-of-no-evidence?s=r) is about. Of COURSE there's evidence, both for and against it. The existence of the lab within ten miles of the initial center of spread is weak evidence for it. So is the fact the lab was working on live infectious coronaviruses in specimens. So is the fact that the lab imported animals from far away.
It's not conclusive evidence (or even enough to make it likely, IMO), but there definitely is evidence.
Would you mind adding some content to your sneer?
None of this is racist. I'm literally suggesting Fauci and Daszak should be on trial? They are both white men afaik, if anything I'm racist against whites, no?
Be nice please.
I'm literally saying Fauci and Daszak are the ones who ought to be on trial?
Yes, be nice to everyone.
"Be nice to the people who see entire vast swathes of the population as congenital subhumans who at best should have inferior rights and at worst should be extirpated!"
I see this over and over, and I would take it more seriously if the people saying this recognized that racism isn't nice and (more importantly) that civility requires symmetry. If you're just civil and nice all the time to people who aren't civil or nice to you, you're just letting yourself be exploited for no real reason. As it is, it seems like little more than an attempt to abuse rationalist social norms.
"Be nice to the people who see entire vast swathes of the population as congenital subhumans who at best should have inferior rights and at worst should be extirpated!"
I don't know anyone who has this view, (I live and work in Trump country.) I was thinking of trying to steelman some of the views I do hear that you might consider 'racist'. But that gets rather involved and let me just say that I think there could be a lot of common ground between the poor whites that live around here and the poor blacks that live in urban areas. I'm not sure if it's intentional or not, but these two groups are kept separate and treated as antagonists, when they really could be cooperating for the benefit of both.
People around here are civil and nice, (of course there are some a-holes everywhere.) My impression is that there is less civility (to the other) in the costal elite areas of our country, I don't spend anytime in big cities, so I don't really know if this impression is right or not.
Look, I'm not the rationalism police, but I do think that if you're _not_ interested in suppressing your feelings to debate ideas on their merits rather than throwing insults at people then there might be other corners of the internet which are more suitable for that kind of thing.
In short, yes, people should suppress their feelings. Or if unable to do so, they should reach for the scroll bar rather than the reply button.
Sure you can treat people however you want. Personally if you've been treated badly by one person in some 'group' I think it's wrong to denigrate the whole group because of one person, but that is your choice.
Re: being nice on this forum.
I'm not going to look up the real words Scott wrote, but to paraphrase,
1.) Be true
2.) Be useful
3.) Be nice
Posting here you should have 2 out of 3. I think an old Herold family adage is useful here. "If you can't say something nice, it's often better to say nothing at all."
Yea, it is noticeable that the only people I'm personally acquainted with IRL who think the lab-leak theory is true are also the only people I knew who were Obama "birthers".
My impression is that it was ignored by the public, because the media treated it as a crackpot conspiracy theory. (In some part because of Daszak's behind the scenes work.) The truth doesn't depend on whether the red or blue team had the idea first. There is also a chilling effect going on in science, where scientists are (rightly) afraid to go against the main stream narrative. (It's not worth their career to say something.) I'm reading "Unsettled" now, and the same thing goes on with climate scientists.
It was treated as a crackpot conspiracy theory in early 2020 (and to be fair, many versions of it *were* crackpot conspiracy theories). Then there was a period in early 2021 where it suddenly burst into the mainstream.
Maybe the real power/bias of media is to be able to keep an issue in front of people's noses.
It also explains why people get so angry when the other side dares to keep an issue in front of people's noses.
I have literally no medical research background, but seems like many here do. The question is directed to people who identify as having some. Would you say it is true that there is a stagnation in obesity and obesity prevention research, or is it actually progressing about as fast as other (which? comparable how?) comparable research fields? If it is indeed stagnating, what would you identify as the chief bottleneck?
Have you been following Wegovy (semaglutide)? It's historically been used as a diabetes drug, but the FDA approved it to treat obesity last year. It costs over $1,000 per month, but it is the most effective weight loss drug ever. In clinical trials with a 1+ year follow-up, the treatment group lost 12% of their body weight compared to a placebo. It might be a gamechanger.
https://www.fda.gov/news-events/press-announcements/fda-approves-new-drug-treatment-chronic-weight-management-first-2014
https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/glp-1-and-obesity
Whoever comes up with an effective treatment for obesity is going to be able to make an insane amount of money with it, because half the US and a lot of the rest of the world suffers from it. I think that alone is enough to guarantee that researchers will pursue obesity treatment quite energetically.
I have a strong medical research background, but mostly in a different field (been a while since I did anything in metabolic syndrome space). I'd say the issue is that the scope of the problem is massive. Look up "metabolic pathways chart" on Google and you'll find some outdated but ridiculously complex diagrams of the problem we're working to solve. It's akin to cancer in that the solution lies somewhere between "some obscure molecule/interaction buried in a mess of other pathways that we just need to identify somewhere" and "we won't solve this until we understand the intricacies of intra- and inter-cellular signaling across multiple organ systems".
That's on the biochemical pathways side of things. The 'easier' side is trying to understand what it is about modernity that has led to all this obesity and what can be done to help people overcome it (without requiring will power greater than that possessed by the patient for success).
As to the question, "Are people still looking at this hard?" Yes. Very much. The bigger the problem gets, the more resources and brainpower are attracted to the problem. People are asking all the questions, like "has the recent shift in societal usage of [obscure chemical/behavior/whatever] contributed?", that you'd think they should ask. It's always possible we're missing something, even something 'we should have thought of' long ago. But the problem is really hard, similar to many other hard problems in biology.
CF: asthma/allergy/IBD/cancer/anxiety/depression/heart disease. Cures against chronic diseases are tough. Reliable prevention measures are also tough. Sorry that it goes so slow. Personally, I'm working on an idea for cancer that I think will eventually have a huge impact, but it'll still take years before we see a big shift in outcomes. That's because even when we know what works, it still takes time in clinical trials.
Not all psychologists are as stoopit as that. I know psychologists who work with people on coping with illnesses such as cancer that nobody thinks have a psychological cause. I'm sure it is also possible to think of obesity as a metabolic disorder, and to work with people on coping with the disorder and making as many end runs as possible around the barriers it puts up to weight loss.
I myself have not looked into current research on obesity and am pretty agnostic about what is the most valid way to think about what's going on there. Though it does seem to me intuitively plausible that our brains were optimized for an environment where it is hard to get enough calories. Under those conditions, it mades sense for us to find slabs of animal fat or entire honeycombs absolutely delicious and to want to eat as much fat and sugar possible on the rare occasions when we got the chance.. So maybe obesity is the result of living in an environment where high-calorie foods are all around us, and no work at all to get.
I just published a new Substack post: "Weird cause area #1 - kidney stone pain"
https://moreisdifferent.substack.com/p/weird-cause-area-1-kidney-stone-pain?s=w
This is part of a new series of posts I have planned on weird (potential) EA cause areas that are either completely new or that have been discussed before but are under-appreciated.
I'd like to see somebody review the book "The Shrinking of America" by Bernie Zilbergeld. Here's the best paragraph in the book. According to Arthur Janov, whose Primal Therapy created such a stir in the early 1970s, his methods produce "a tensionless, defense-free life in which one is completely his own self and experiences deep feeling and internal unity....People become themselves and stay themselves." Clients become more intelligent; are better coordinated; enjoy sex more; work better but do not overwork; lose their depressions, phobias, anxieties, as well as their compulsions to take drugs and alcohol, to overeat, and to smoke; and they are "never moody." There are special benefits for women: increased breast size for flat-chested women and the disappearance of premenstrual cramps and irregular periods. In a way, says Janov, "the post-Primal person is a new kind of human being," one who "is truly in control of his life." (Before readers rush off to sign up for Primal Therapy, I should mention that I am unaware of any independent research demonstrating the validity of these claims.)
Humans are only 3.5% efficient at accomplishing useful work.
https://www.militantfuturist.com/the-extraordinary-inefficiency-of-humans/
The last time I trained an ML model I spent about a week writing and debugging it, about a day training it on a large dataset and then it spent slightly less than three and a half seconds doing productive work which produced surplus for the world (generating the answer to the classification problem I had). Therefore machine learning models are only 0.0005% efficient.
Obviously I'm being a bit facetious, but I think so is the author of this piece - you really can't measure human surplus as a function of hours spent silently working on spreadsheets at an office when so many important human breakthroughs are clearly driven by chance conversations, or pursuing side projects in 'nonproductive' hours, or just because you have been looking after your brain well enough through a combination of sleeping, eating and socialising that you make a creative breakthrough on an important project.
(To say nothing of the fact that the _purpose_ of human existence isn't obviously to do productive work forever until you die - I don't know why you assume a machine intelligent enough to compete with humans at high-level human work like cancer research would choose to do productive work forever until it obsoleted - perhaps without the need to consume shelter and food to stay alive intelligent machines might choose to ignore work entirely)
Given that the "inefficient" parts in this calculation include childhood, leisure time, and retirement, perhaps we should be looking to *minimize* human efficiency.
Life is about many, many more things than efficiency.
After skimming the article, it seems to be in comparison to a machine operating 24/7 with perfect thermodynamics. Sleeping, eating, and leisure are considered not to be "work". The author then says that only a quarter of work time is spent doing "real, useful work". On top of this, there is an offset made by people who do "counterproductive work" like journalism with bias or working at a hedge fund.
If that's the baseline, 3.5% is *shockingly* productive.
"machine operating 24/7 with perfect thermodynamics"
Sounds reasonable humans would lose to a machine like that, and a machine like that sounds impossible to build.
What would the purpose of all this "useful work" be, anyway?
The examples the article gives are things like "A medical researcher who runs experiments that help discover a vaccine for a painful, widespread disease." and "A carpenter who helps build affordable housing that meets all building codes, in a place where it is in high demand." Some later lines suggest that the work has to be progressing further as a society, in some way. Again, I'm only skimming it.
I should point out that the author's view about a quarter of work time being spent productively is just their personal observation (a.k.a. probably pulled out of thin air).
It's probably a lot higher when you don't have to share a lab with a man trying to assess the value of human life in Joules.
Any opinions on who to vote for in the California Governor primaries, either from a strategic or idealistic voter's perspective?
Give up and accept death lol
For real though, and this applies to all races in all states:
If you are left and your local Green isn't a fukin nut bar, vote for them.
If you are right and your local Libertarian isn't a fukin nut bar, vote for them.
Probably don't vote for Republicans ever, unless you lucked out and live in a state were they didn't get Primaried by some Pizzagate true believer. But they will caucause with the nutbars/invade the middleast: This time it will work I swear/Dynamite the TPP if you let them, so you do you.
Vote Democrat if you want neoliberal world order forever with no changes of significance to anything ever.
I'm opposed to Gavin Newsom, but I don't think any of the other candidates have any chance of beating him.
My general approach (as a bleeding-heartish libertarian) for California primaries is based on the observation that in statewide races and most district elections, anyone with an R next to his name is doomed in the general election due both to how liberal the median voter is and how toxic the Republican Party brand is in most of the state. Thus, the strategy most conducive to my ideological goals is to vote for the most fiscally conservative (or failing that, most left-libertarian) of the viable Democratic Party candidates (or a viable independent or third-party candidate, if there is one).
I haven't yet started any serious evaluation of the candidates in this particular election, but at first glance it looks like there's no serious Democratic challenger to Newsom (unsurprisingly), and the only third party candidates with any major endorsements are Luis Rodriguez (Green), who is running to Newsom's left, and Michael Shellenberger (NPP), who seems to be running on a weird mix of conservative Republican and technocratic left-libertarian rhetoric. I need to do more reading about Shellenberger, and I want to wait and see if there's signs of other candidates being potentially viable both in the primary and the general elections before I start to decide how I'm likely to vote.
On the Futurati Podcast we recently interviewed ACX grant winner Nathan P Young on prediction markets, policy, and futarchy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F4UfK9qfW3E
I also think our most recent episode with Rik on cybesecurity and the future of warfare is a banger too:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0wtkTbGaB5s
Question: could consciousness have evolved as a solution to the black-box problem?
One of the challenges with AI is that we often don't know why the AI is spitting out certain results, and the lack of knowledge can cause trouble. My favourite example is Google Flu Trends. The model seemed really good at predicting the flu based on what people searched for, but it turns out it had over-fitted for spurious seasonal search terms, like "high school basketball." Its predictive capabilities therefore seemed impressive at first but then totally flunked.
(Article about the google flu trends: https://www.wired.com/2015/10/can-learn-epic-failure-google-flu-trends/ )
Consciousness didn't necessarily evolve for anything useful (it could be a byproduct of other useful stuff). But if it did evolve for something useful, solving the black-box problem is one possibility. When brains evolved algorithms to find food or predators in sense data, perhaps they evolved the ability to attach qualia to those interpretations to better enable a top-down analysis of where those interpretations came from. It might make it easier to grasp what inputs are spurious bullshit.
My personal theory is that consciousness and "free will" evolved as a means of getting around the Buridan's Donkey problem, via the inclusion of a stochastic, semi-random element in an otherwise deterministic system. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Buridan%27s_ass)
Yeah, agree that acting semi-randomly is a pretty lame stand-in for what we think of as free will. Sort of like using vaseline instead of butter on your toast.
That's the sort of messy philosophical issue that people could discuss and debate until the sun explodes without ever figuring out a clear answer.
But just for the sake of argument, the Oxford Dictionary defines "free will" as "the power of acting without the constraint of necessity or fate; the ability to act at one's own discretion." If whatever neurological process results in "free will" is truly random on a quantum level, as opposed to merely pseudo-random, then it fits that definition, since it would result in truly non-deterministic behavior.
What would "acting at one's own discretion" actually entail? Even ignoring the physics of the debate and focusing purely on the conceptual level, the notion of a "true choice" that is neither caused by anything nor random seems to be inherently paradoxical. This holds true even if you believe that our actions are driven by an immaterial soul that exists outside of the body, because that soul would still either make its decisions on the basis of causal factors, or not (in which case its decisions are indeed random).
Stochastic systems can indeed be neither fully deterministic nor fully random, in the sense that they can produce multiple different outcomes from the same starting condition. But this isn't because they somehow transcend determinism and randomness alike (which, again, seems definitionally impossible to me). It's because they have elements of both, with an outcome being randomly generated from a deterministically generated selection of possible outcomes.
I thought "semi-random" from the first comment was a better word choice than "truly random". If people are driven by deterministic forces but have the ability to "override" them, I would expect that to end up looking roughly semi-random from the perspective of the deterministic universe.
You seem to be thinking of consciousness as the ability to recognize, via introspective access, how and why we came to a certain judgment. So, for instance, by your logic if Google were conscious it could have explained how it came up with its flu predictions: "Yeah, I looked for searches that had a high correlation for flu prevalence. So 'fever,' was a good one, and so was 'congestion' and so was 'high school basketball'. . ." But people, despite being conscious, will make mistakes that are similar to Google's flu prediction error, and have no introspective access to the process. For instance, they will evaluate identical resumes differently depending on whether the name on the resume is George or Susan or Latasha -- but if you ask them whether their judgment is influenced by applicant's gender or race they will tell you truthfully that they are sure it is not. They have no introspective access to their bias.
Also, I'm sure it would be possible to get an AI to "tell" you how it arrived at its "opinion" of something. Consciousness, whatever that is, would not be required. For instance, seems like the AI that treated high school basketball as a valid predictor of flu could be programmed to go through an AI version of the process human beings went through when they recognized the absurdity of having h.s. basketball in there. People didn't conclude that was a mistake via some process that AI couldn't learn to do.
Your point about bias being beyond conscious access is well made.
Let me start on your second point and then comment on the first. You point out that you would need to train an AI to go through the first AI's predictors to recognize when they are spurious. Now, imagine if you have only one AI, and you have to train it to not only find predictors for food etc., but to wrap back on itself to find BS predictors. It would need predictors for BS predictors, and maybe predictors for predictors for predictors. It seems like a tricky problem. Maybe if you could add qualia to the food predictor it becomes easier to recognize spurious ones. (Maybe.)
Now, I'm not even sure what it means to add qualia — and if I wasn't conscious myself, I don't think I'd believe it is. But since it is possible, it seems like a good way to store the attributes of things in a manner that makes their key features easier to reflect back on for quality checks.
Back to your first point. If the kind of top-down re-analysis I'm talking about is what consciousness was originally for, it would likely also be true for all conscious brains, including lizards. If true, this means it would also probably include our limbic system. So when I say "consciousness," I'm referring not only to the high level of consciousness you're using to read this, but also the basic limbic-system consciousness that we experience as gut feelings when it's passed along to our executive-level consciousness. I'm saying there's a quality-check process going on in the back of our brains that is minimally conscious, and what we experience as executive-level function is a higher level of consciousness. (All this depends on whether the limbic system does process stuff in terms of qualia, which I've heard people debate before).
All that said, when it is possible to trace a gut feeling back to its source, it's really helpful. Once I felt worried about some teenagers in a store, and realized it had to do with their skin colour, and I corrected the reaction. Perhaps one reason we have executive-level consciousness is that when we can recognize something as bullshit using the full resources of the brain, it really helps.
Being able to tell dalle-2 “now, put that character you just drew into this new situation” would strike me as a non-trivial step in that direction.
I've noticed a number of "rationalist" type folks taking Dominic Cummings's recent writings on nuclear deterrence very seriously; I'm thinking of these pieces...
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-iii-more-on
https://dominiccummings.substack.com/p/people-ideas-machines-ii-catastrophic
...in which Cummings tends to claim in strong and unequivocal language that (his words) "In the Cold War America based its nuclear strategy on an intellectual framework that was false. It defined standards of ‘rationality’ then concluded the Soviets would not use nuclear weapons in many scenarios. There was a governing tautology: rational leaders would be deterred otherwise they would be irrational. Given this tautology, more vulnerability improves ‘stability’ (e.g submarine launched weapons), while better defence is ‘destabilising’ (e.g missile defence)."
I've looked into Cummings's main source for this line of thought and found it to be inaccurate in its read of Soviet Cold War strategy, so I've been sharing this in some rationalist spaces (this comment is adapted from an earlier one on Zvi Mowshowitz's blog). Consider this a warning about taking Cummings too seriously on these matters.
I don't disagree with Cummings about everything, and I certainly share his concerns about the disturbingly high overall likelihood of great power nuclear conflict, but be careful with his stuff--he is not a well-informed source on nuclear deterrence. He often says things about how the USSR was willing to push the button at the drop of a hat, and this turns out to be not at all accurate from what I can tell. He also suggests at times that constructing missile defense is a useful policy in great power nuclear standoffs; this is badly mistaken for some pretty basic reasons.
--
After Zvi M talked up Cummings's views on nukes, I became curious about the Keith Payne book “The Fallacies of Cold War Deterrence” which is often cited by Cummings in support of the view that nuclear deterrence is much less stable than we think and rests on stupid assumptions about adversary psychology. So I gave the book a read and checked out some of the references.
The book makes some conceptual points that I think are useful as caveats to the usual theory of deterrence. The point is that no deterrence regime will work against every conceivable opponent. You need to take the specific goals and psychology of the opponent you face into account, rather than just assuming they are rational actors and leaving it at that. I don’t think these points count as objections to the prevailing school of thought, exactly, unless you turn it into a straw man version of itself (no, I don’t think Schelling et al believed that nuclear deterrence would’ve definitely worked against Hitler–but it is still an important point to note that sometimes a Hitler does come around). That part of the book was clarifying.
But my main goal was to clarify whether the empirical evidence Payne cites supported his contention about the disconnect between US and Soviet war plans, which he states thus (p 25-26):
“Only recently, courtesy of greater access to past Soviet decision-making practices, has it become virtually inarguable that the Soviet leadership never accepted the West’s definition of rationality with regard to nuclear weapons, and that Soviet expectations of US behavior, largely derived from the dogma of Marxist-Leninist ideology, appear to have been a significant factor in Soviet nuclear war planning.”
He refers several times to Soviet plans that “called for very heavy and very early nuclear and chemical strikes throughout Western Europe in the event of war.” (There is a grain of truth to this, but I think you’ll agree with me that it misrepresents his sources in an important way.)
The meatiest English-language source he cites is Heuser, “Warsaw pact military doctrines in the 1970s and 1980s: Findings in the East German archives,” which I hadn’t read before. It is a treasure trove, but it doesn’t say what Payne says it says. Let me quote the abstract, because the difference with Payne’s interpretation of the facts is night and day:
“Paradoxically, while the USSR was deploying more usable and survivable nuclear weapons (the SS‐20), it was developing a strategy which attempted to win a limited war in Europe with conventional weapons only. Pact records do show planning for preemptive nuclear strikes in response to observations of NATO preparations for nuclear launches. Great care was taken not to proceed to a nuclearization of the conflict unless the enemy was about to do so. These planning documents also reveal that the Pact was not expecting to launch all the nuclear weapons at its disposal.”
Essentially, Heuser’s read on the evidence is that for much of the Cold War the Soviets expected NATO to use nuclear weapons 5-6 days into a large conventional war (which was indeed NATO doctrine) and intended to use their nuclear weapons *in counterforce attacks* to destroy NATO nuclear weapons before this could be done. This was because they lacked the ability to gain early warning of NATO intent to launch. To quote Heuser again:
” Consequently, with fewer nuclear weapons at its disposal until the early 1970s than the United States had, the Soviet Union initially had to adopt a nuclear strategy of a massive, simultaneous strike of all forces available to it. Because of the limitations of Soviet abilities to monitor NATO activities, this would have had to be a preemptive strike. Only in the late 1970s did the USSR gradually acquire the technical means required for its preferred strategy, launch-on-warning: this meant Warsaw Pact nuclear release at the moment it became clear that NATO had launched or was about to launch nuclear weapons against the Soviet Union [18].”
By the late 70s, when the Soviets had the technology and capabilities to adopt a more American-style strategy, they did so, contrary to Payne’s claims. For example:
PAYNE:
“NATO policy sought to maintain a lid on the potential for nuclear escalation via sophisticated intra-war deterrence concepts of rational wartime bargaining and limited nuclear war. These US deterrence concepts mistakenly assumed a similarly minded, “rational” opponent, and thus were wholly incompatible with Soviet war plans.”
HEUSER:
“The Warsaw Pact exercise plans, however, confirm the careful analysis of contrary evidence by Notra Trulock, who argues that the Soviet Union did plan also for limited nuclear strikes [87]. Warsaw Pact planning assumed in the late 1970s and early 1980s that there might be several nuclear exchanges, but there was obviously the hope that followon exchanges might be avoidable.”
I went into this willing to update in Payne’s direction, and I think some of his theoretical insights are sound, but I think it became clear from my fact-checking that he misrepresents the empirical evidence about Soviet planning quite badly. The truth is much more complicated than his take, and in some ways contradicts it. I certainly don’t see any evidence that the Soviets were “irrational” by Schelling’s lights. (Castro may have been that irrational, but on the other hand he may have urged a launch knowing that the Soviets wouldn’t agree… kind of like how the Poles lately keep asking NATO to do things against Russia that they know the US will veto, as a sort of brinksmanship virtue signaling.)
I conclude that Cummings is too credulous, and is willing to assert with great confidence claims from a semi-popular book without checking the references to confirm its key claims.
--
To dismiss his claims about missile defense is much more straightforward; I've been surprised to see some smart people convinced by them, which must just mean that these people haven't looked into the issue in any detail. The classic argument against missile defense is that it only incentivizes the construction of more warheads by the enemy. MIRVing (putting multiple warheads on one's offensive missiles) makes it cheap and easy to overwhelm any missile defense system by launching more warheads than the defense system has interceptors. If you build interceptors to destroy your enemy's warheads, they will simply (for much cheaper) build delivery systems for an equal number of additional warheads and you've gotten less than nowhere on the whole. I don’t see any way around this calculus unless the technology changes drastically.
The calculus is different against N Korea for the near future, since they can’t afford very many missiles and lack MIRV technology. That said, MIRV is a technology that took the US and the Soviets about 10 years to develop following their invention of intercontinental missiles. North Korea is working now to develop this technology ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hwasong-17 ), so it's unlikely that missile defense will provide a feasible check against them for much more than a decade longer.
Zvi gets a lot wrong because he is a blogger like Scott who writes on a very broad range of subjects...but he has little to none of Scott's social intelligence or common sense. He also trusts twitter and uses it as his primary source which is just batshit insane lmao
He also seems to be imprudently credulous of anything that goes against "the mainstream".
It pains me whenever people go "the media is biased and sometimes makes mistakes" and conclude "therefore, I should put all my trust in people who don't even pretend to be unbiased or do fact checking".
Given Zvi's goal of providing weekly digests on the issues of the day, I'm not sure what would be a better way to go about it, but you're right that it seems to lead to more errors than e.g. Scott is prone to. And once you're reading Twitter for the news updates, it's hard not to read Twitter for the people making asses of themselves, and that filters into his posts in a way that can sometimes undermine the value of his project.
This is a great comment, thank you for writing it <3
How do I choose a school for my children? My partner and I are open to public school, private school, homeschooling - but how do we evaluate our options? I'm looking for book recommendations, essay recommendations, general advice. I'm aware of Great Schools, but it seems like their metric boils down to state test scores and SAT test scores. Should I believe these metrics capture academic rigor? What's more, social and moral development are of comparable import to me - how do I evaluate a school's ability to foster - or at least not impede - those?
Don't send your children to school. It's a prison camp where the inmates are cruel to eachother, it eats up as much time as it can (both in school and outside in the form of hours of homework), very little of what is taught is retained, and it connects any academic topics with so much anxiety that people never want to think about them again. I wanted to join a sweatshop instead so that I could at least get paid, and wasn't allowed to because child labor is illegal. If you can't homeschool, at least "unschool".
How can one “unschool” — let them stay at home with a computer and some supervision?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
Ask local experienced realtors. Particularly middle-aged females, of which there are usually plenty. They absolutely know the best schools and the best districts, and they'll tell you straight up without throwing in a load of US News participation trophy bullshit.
Just to throw in my two cents, the flexibility of the administrators can make a big difference. I went to a school that had very little resources, but the administrators were willing to let us partner with outside resources (colleges, tutors, etc) to supplement. I don’t think many schools would have done this so easily, so it’s at least something worth probing about if none of the options in your area seem amazing.
Every kid is going to be different. Probably your kids are like you and/or your partner. What kind of school would have been good for you all?
Aristocrats of the past took it into their own hands and hired tutors in their speciality to didact on that isolated topic, and often the moral lessons came from those who taught the humanities but mainly from within the family. The sociality came from the courts they frequented or lived in, which is a gonner’ today (unless we consider, rather rightly, our corporate campuses as todays ‘courts’ [yet our children are unable to frequent those in the manner in which they could with the past courts]). Living in a upper class or, if lucky [because most have pathetic communal areas when we’re thinking of the purpose of education/culturation] an upper-middle-class community which has communal areas is the best bet, I think, and, if one can afford it, homeschooling with private tutors for specialist subjects, allowing them to ‘free learn’ or ‘unschool’. Astral Codex Ten did a great article recently on aristocratic tutelage and it’s importance in procuring geniuses of the past, and how we’re lacking them these days due to the absence of this style of pedagogy.
Scott's conclusion was actually that we aren't lacking them due to the death of that style of pedagogy. We either aren't lacking them at all, or we are lacking them for some other reason, depending upon your perspective.
To answer would require more info about what you're looking for. For our bright kid, it was clear that private school X was the best in the city for academics. Turns out it's pretty good in academics for the average kid, but was unwilling to teach this kid, who could pick up the new lesson in a few minutes, more. We put him in the public school, which has reading groups, math groups, and a gifted program in elementary. That worked till he was done with elementary. Now he's spinning his wheels, but unwilling to move to, well, IDK where he could go. Maybe skip a grade.
Two other kids, it was dependent on their particular need. All 3 went to different schools. (My case may be unusual.)
For moral development, I was pleased with School A's Bible stories, which are appropriate at the K level. Less so with the Catholic school (I'm Catholic) where they emphasized "the same mass K-12 on Thu's." We already have mass birth-death on Sun's; I wanted something tailored to maturity level.
My point is, I don't think you can get effective *general* advice. It varies way too much based on your city, your wants, your capabilities (at least home school does) and the child. But I expect when you investigate your options, things will start to click.
Test score metrics are a proxy for the culture and temperament.of the students and their parents at least as much as they are.for academic rigor. Kids from backgrounds that place a premium on academic achievement and whose parents support and encourage them in their school work (or who discourage unstudiousness and academic failure) are generally going to do a lot better in objective measures of academic prowess like standardized test scores. Academic rigor is also reflected, of course. And at the individual level at least, temperament and intelligence have a huge effect.
The impact of the cultures of the students and their families in test score ratings is likely a bonus from your perspective, since that's one aspect of the social and moral dimensions of schooling (far from the only one, of course). Kids norm off their peers as well as taking cues from parents and teachers, so having peers from families that encourage taking schooling seriously is likely to be beneficial to a goal of encouraging your own kids to do so.
In addition, it seems likely (and seems to be supported by comparing my own experience at high-rated public schools with anecdotal accounts from my friends of their experiences at high, medium, and low-rated public schools, and also from anecdotes from a couple of friends who have worked as teachers) that the quality of instruction tends to get limited by the degree to which most of the students pay attention in class, do assigned work and reading, etc. Both because teachers need to slow down and focus on the basics (and spend time and effort controlling the classroom and dealing with disruptive students rather than on teaching material), and because most teachers prefer teaching more studious students so schools with a more culturally studious student body tend to have an easier time hiring and retaining good teachers.
> Kids norm off their peers as well as taking cues from parents and teachers, so having peers from families that encourage taking schooling seriously is likely to be beneficial to a goal of encouraging your own kids to do so
Though there's also a pathological version of this where your kids go to school surrounded by a bunch of cram school kids, kids whose parents force them to spend forty hours a week in cram schools outside real school, working hard to master test-taking strategies so that they can get those extra few points on every exam to get ahead of all the other cram school kids.
That's not what I want for my kids. I want them to be surrounded by kids who are smart and motivated, but interested in learning for its own sake, not solely for the purpose of maximising test scores to get selected for things.
That's true, but I'm not sure how widespread a problem that is. I went to top-rated (by test scores) public schools in a variety of locales (my parents moved around a lot when I was in high school) and never felt like I was surrounded by cram school kids. In particular, I remember myself and most of my friends being somewhere between "smart but lazy" and diligent but not insanely so. Although my own experience is almost a quarter century ago, so things may have changed in the meantime.
So with homeschooling, a lot of your experience will have to do with the support you are able to get. You should go try to find the groups in your area that do that, and see what they are like/what they offer, etc.
In most areas this is a lot easier if you are Christian than otherwise, but it's not like there aren't secular groups. But definitely see what's going on at them first, because especially if you are atheist/agnostic those are a big part of the social world your kid will end up seeing.
I'm a maths and physics tutor looking for some more students. I can teach to anyone below undergrad level, and for undergrad stuff I can teach: mechanics, QM, ODE/PDEs, chaos theory, stat mech, probability theory, logic, QFT, quantum computing basics, ML, RL and some deep learning stuff. Message me if you want my services, my rates are negotiable.
Hi all! I'm a Master's student and for my dissertation I'm doing a qualitative study on expert forecasters. If you're reading this, interested participating, and are in the top percentile on either Metaculus or GJO, or a Superforecaster, could you leave a comment or contact me via the mail connected to this account or through Twitter @meraxion? Thanks! If you want more information, read on;
The particular interview methodology I'll be using is called Applied Cognitive Task Analysis (ACTA), which is a mostly structured series of (3) interview techniques used to figure out how experts in a field view their task, and what cues and strategies they look out for that they think novices won't know about. The methodology is often used as a first step for further construction of training manuals and things like that. The 3 techniques are; the Task Diagram, the Knowledge Audit, and the Simulation Interview. The Task Diagram asks the expert to lay out the (up to six) high-level steps of their task. The Knowledge Audit digs into the cues and strategies experts use for understanding aspects of their task (and making decisions in task situations). The Simulation Interview looks at the expert's actions in situ while doing the task, asking questions about actions, situation assessment, critical cues, and potential errors, at each step (as identified in the Task Diagram).
The product of the is the Task Diagram, and a Cognitive Demands Table outlining what came up during the interview(s) as the important/difficult/demanding parts of the task.
Interviews would be conducted in a month's time (June, maybe late May).
If you think this doesn't sound too daft, please don't hesitate to contact me using one of the methods I linked to above, and/or sharing with others whom you think might be interested!
Can anyone recommend a (free, online) introduction to statistical methods in climatology.(especially statistical methods in paleoclimatology) which doesn't assume domain knowledge, but also doesn't sacrifice mathematical rigour? What is the CS229 of climatology?
how do you manage the acid base balance in your body? What supplements do you take? How do you increase that HCO3 in your blood (i don’t intend to produce an alkalosis)? I am certain that taking Magnesiumcitrate is not enough (as it is converted to bicarbonate in the kidneys, but it doesn’t mean that it necessarily increases serum HCO3). What else do you do to manage it? don’t call it “bogus science” because clearly it’s not. Drop some knowledge here, please.
The same way I manage my thetan levels.
I rely on the buffering capacity of my blood.
Also, you might be interested in the Wim Hof method, which gets some extraordinary results by, among other techniques, breathwork that stresses said buffer in both directions. Wim Hof himself says the pH adjustment is part of why it works, I say he's full of shit but he gets results so whatever.
I leave it to the organs that have hundreds of millions years experience.
My wife has a bladder sensitivity to acidic foods and has had good reults with filters that make your water more basic.
> don’t call it “bogus science” because clearly it’s not.
Why? Managing pH of body is simple homeostasis mechanism, it would be really surprising of body couldn't do it on its own.
And it does.
I am aware of that. Let’s say you eat salad with lots of apple cider vinegar, which contains acetic acid and do some exercise afterwards which leads to increased serum lactic acid. The body does compensate for it but only slowly. Taking magnesiumcitrate helps a little but I am pretty sure that one can do even more than that.
Depends what you mean by "slowly." The half life of lactate in normal people is about 15 minutes[1]. Does that seem slow to you?
--------------
[1] https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/2766757/
Generally speaking a slight increase in lactic acid for a short period of time is not going to affect homeostasis to a significant degree- otherwise there would be serious problems whenever you exercised too much. Is there some reaction in particular you worry about not proceeding correctly at too low of a pH, or what?
Is there a problem with the body's timescale for removing lactic acid? I don't understand why you would need to speed up that process. Could you exain, or perhaps point me towards a resource that's not just pseudoscience?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Acid%E2%80%93base_homeostasis#Homeostatic_mechanisms
I let my body take care of it for me :)
I don't take any supplements, my kidneys manage this for me .
I'm interested in having a child at some point, but fear that I simply won't be able to cope with severe sleep deprivation.
E. g., according to this study, UK parents get less than 5 hours of sleep per night for the first year: https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/baby-sleeping-child-new-parents-night-newborn-parenting-sleep-pattern-a8406536.html
I literally *cannot imagine* enduring that kind of sleep deprivation. I feel utterly awful and am largely incapable of any productive work the next day if I get less than around 7 hours of sleep. And I find it basically impossible to nap during the day, no matter how exhausted I am.
Are there any parents here who had a similar lack of previous ability to cope with sleep deprivation? Are there any good studies about what parents can do to get their children to sleep through the night as soon as possible?
(I've read claims that bed-sharing helps--it just seems implausible to me that mothers in traditional high-fertility societies were enduring modern levels of new-parent sleep deprivation throughout their reproductive years.)
One possibly overlooked aspect from my experience: with my first I was shocked at how hard the sleep deprivation hit me. I was hallucinating. Then, my second was a worse sleeper and I was tired but fine. I found this puzzling until I remembered that I’d experience much more blood loss during the delivery. I highly recommend being checked for iron deficient anemia after birth!
There was only a 3 or 4 week period when it was really bad. Maybe even less (its hard to remember from the lack of sleep!).
For a while the recommendation is to have the baby eat every 3 hours so you will wake up the baby at night to feed. This is really why there is so little sleep. Yes the baby will wake up and cry but there are only two reasons: diaper or food. If you keep a constant feeding schedule you are much less likely to get unexpected night wake ups. One night my wife and I slept through our alarms and the baby sleep for 5 hours straight when he was maybe 2 weeks old. We thought this was horrible but the doctor said it was fine and to just let him sleep for as long as he would after we fed him around 10 or 11pm. He would then sleep for like 4 or 5 hours before waking to be fed. This helped with sleep a lot as we were sleeping a couple hours before 10/11pm.
>I find it basically impossible to nap during the day, no matter how exhausted I am.
That will change. I was not a napper either and am not any more. But during the first month I would find time to nap. Usually after the first feed in the morning around 5 or 6am. When my inlaws came to visit I napped a lot more. Almost as if my body knew someone else was here to take over (my wife wasn't as thrilled).
>Are there any good studies about what parents can do to get their children to sleep through the night as soon as possible?
We purchased the program Taking Cara Babies https://takingcarababies.com. Best $79 we ever spent. Our son was sleeping about 8 hours or more a night by 3 months and was at 10 or more by 6. Before 3 months we got consistent 6 hour periods before needing to feed and then we would sleep another 2 or 3 hours. There are many books or courses you can buy. They probably all work. The key is that you have a plan to follow which makes things a lot better.
The biggest take away from the Taking Cara Babies course is to use a swaddle and, when they are under 5 months, not go more than 3 hours without a nap and feeding (we have basically be running our lives in 3 hour chunks for the past year). Many friends who have had issues with sleep also had no napping or feeding schedule and often the baby wouldn't sleep because they were hungry or over tired (Cara speculates that colic is just the baby being overtired).
Definitely no to cosleeping. No only does it increase the risk of suffocation, I just can't imagine how having another person in my bed would make me or them sleep better. We had the crib in our room of the first couple months but stopped after it because clear the baby didnt care either way.
Finally, I'll just say that any exhaustion you experience will always be outweighed by the joy of having the baby. I was not a big baby person before having a kid and probably could have lived a very happy life without having one, but now I just can't imagine life being complete without a child.
From my parents: sleep deprivation is much easier to handle when you are 21 than when you are 31. Have kids as early as you can.
That is very good advice. Putting it off until you achieve some theoretical level of financial security is a waste of time. As long as you have a roof over your head, a steady job and a reliable spouse then that is all you need.
Everyone is telling you their experience was better than 5 hours a night - just to provide the opposite anecdata, mine was much worse - it got to the point where my wife and I mostly didn't sleep in the same bed so that one of us on 'baby duty' could co-sleep (which improved things slightly) and get perhaps four or five hours and one of us on 'night off' could sleep properly.
Everyone telling you that your body is remarkably adaptable is entirely right however - after a 3 or 4 month period of adjustment I found very difficult mentally and physically, I basically stopped noticing it.
Put aside some money to be able to hire someone to be with your kid for the night, or for the large part of the night, for a few months.
Sample size of two: my kids slept through the night by the time they were 6 months old. You might also get lucky.
If you can afford it, you can hire people to take care of newborns overnight for you ("post-partum doulas", "night nurses", or even grandparents if you're lucky). If you're breastfeeding then of course you will be roused somewhat, but you'll still sleep quite a lot more. It's not cheap, but for upper middle class people I think it's some of the best money you can spend. The more expensive versions of the service include sleep training your newborn (once they're old enough) and also include light chores as time allows.
+1 to all the other advice about sleep training as early as appropriate.
Experiences vary a lot, there's a wide range of both how difficult babies are and how well suited parents are to handling that kind of stress. I do think that sleep deprivation is worse than most people realize (even as they're experiencing it), and I also think after a couple years a lot of parents start to forget how tough the newborn phase was.
Also the Snoo is a fancy bassinet that also restraints/soothes the baby and for some babies works wonders. It costs about $1000 new but there's a big resale market too.
My sample size is two and I seriously doubt an _average_ as low as 5 hours per night. Some nights, yes. But then other nights the baby will sleep like, well, a baby.
With my second child my wife proposed what in hindsight I realize was a rationalist agreement. Since she is a lifelong morning person who finds middle-of-the-night stuff to be really disruptive and taxing, while I am generally the reverse, we agreed that middle-of-the-night baby wrangling would be on me while she would deal with early mornings.
Importantly we made this agreement in advance without knowing which way the kiddo would generally fall on that continuum.
In practical application the cutoff between the two categories turns out be roughly 5 AM, for no particular reason other than it seemed reasonable to each of us.
That worked out well all the way through toddlerhood. I couldn't even say right now which of us got the lion's share of the bleary-eyed baby wrangling, but regardless the agreement held up in practice and we both think it was very helpful.
Sample size of two. If they cry during the night (and they will), don't go to them immediately. Let them cry for a while before you sort them out, slowly increase the delay and eventually they will stop doing it. Mine both slept through the night after the first month.
Also, you will be surprised how well your body can adjust to reduced sleep. You won't be tip-top, but you will still be able to function.
IMHO, the difficulties of looking after new babies are exaggerated. If it was that hard, no one would have any brothers or sisters.
Just to caution - this is effectively a description of 'sleep training', which is described in more detail downthread. The evidence is that it will definitely help improve your sleep, but it is controversial about whether you harm your baby's development / attachment by doing it.
For sure, people have been doing random things to babies for thousands of years and there's no massive risk to life of sleep training, but I assume if you're posting on ACX that you care about eg marginal IQ points which might not show up in the absence of a large and well-conducted trial.
It seems "productive work" and "caring for small children" don't really mix, from second-hand experience of my coworkers. Find an employer who's reasonably chill about things, do the bare minimum and just write off the first two years as a loss.
Sample size of one (so far!) but we got through it all right—our experience was that five hours of sleep was what we were getting during the worst of it but not at all the average of our first year with our kid.
Stuff that helped:
- Sleeping in shifts. Our daughter mostly slept pretty well for her age, with one giant exception: until she was 3+ months old she just never slept unless somebody was holding her. Our parents visited for parts of this, which helped a lot (amazing to have a third set of hands occasionally and get to sleep in with your spouse), and for the rest of it we set it up so that one of us had the baby somewhere we could amuse ourselves—I watched more TV those three months than I have since I was 14, probably—and one of us was sleeping.
We did have to scratch and claw for as much sleep as we needed at this point—like, if you see an opportunity, you go to bed and close your eyes—but it wasn't that long and I found myself much more capable of dealing with sleep deprivation than I thought I would be.
- With no other ideas, we bought this insane-looking "Baby Merlin's Magic Sleep Suit" at Target and put her in it. She looked like the Michelin Man and immediately began sleeping in her crib without issue. By the time she no longer fit in it (several months) the crib was a habit and she slept in there fine in regular clothes. In addition to recommending this specific item I would generalize this advice as "Try stuff, even if it seems kind of ridiculous." Most baby gear can be resold or traded in someplace, so it's worth a shot even if it seems kind of stupid.
- Sleep training! Holy cow I don't know how people do it without sleep training. We did the "cry it out" method. It sucks to listen to your baby cry in the other room as you start doing it, but it sucks a little less when you think about how much the baby would be crying anyway if you were in there trying to make her sleep. Again, sample size of one so far, but two years later our baby is an extremely talkative toddler who loves us and is very well-attached and does a great job of staying in her new bed at night.
I have had trouble staying productive my whole life, so the average ACX reader may vary, but I have found that having a kid basically took away zero productive time from my pre-child life—it's pretty much just a) made me more intentional about doing stuff that I have to do, which makes it faster, and b) cut into the fat, the parts of my day where I don't even remember what I was doing before.
I second the idea of the padded, restraining blanket bag things! Those were fantastic for swaddling two of our three kids and letting them get to sleep. I think the combination of deep pressure and supressing sensations caused by random uncontrolled body movements (which infants have a LOT of) really helped.
(Our second kid hated them, the idea of them, the look of them, and every other characteristic one might identify... so we had to do other options for him. He also hates being tucked in under a blanket at three years old, so maybe has a bit of claustrophobia? We'll see as he gets more communicative.)
Fwiw I consider sleep training to be an incredible life hack that immeasurably improves your quality of life. I liked this concise book: "The Baby Sleep Solution: A Proven Program to Teach Your Baby to Sleep Twelve Hours a Night" https://smile.amazon.com/dp/0399532919, which iirc promises "12 hours sleep by 12 weeks".
Worked for us! ymmv, n=1, but ... my understanding is that the research is pretty clear that sleep training is *effective* - it *will* enable you to sleep through the night. Obviously that's a different question than whether there are positive or negative long-term benefits to the child either way. But ... yeah I love sleep training and think it's great.
And yeah for the first few months, before you can sleep train, sleeping in shifts is great if you have the time and flexibility to pull it off.
Sleep training also worked for us. But I didn't mention it because it is controversal. But we used some form of sleep training for both of our kids and it worked for both.
https://emilyoster.substack.com/p/sleep-training-is-it-bad
Are you a man or woman? I think the sleep deprivation is worst for the woman as she is the one feeding the baby (unless you bottle feed or pump a lot). But either way the body does an amazing job of adjusting. Before kids I couldn't ever take naps. After kids I can nap quite well. And the reality is that infants sleep A LOT. But the issue is they sleep more during the day and they don't sleep for long periods of time. So the hard part is trying to be flexible while the baby adjusts to a normal human sleeping schedule.
Father of a four year old here. My standard advice to new parents on the sleep deprivation front is for the parents to sleep in shifts as much as you reasonably can. Flexible schedules at work make this a lot easier of course, as does generous parental leave for one or both parents. And of course if you're exclusively breastfeeding, that makes it harder, since you'll need to either pump or use formula for the father to be able to do feedings while the mother sleeps.
More or less what my wife and I wound up doing was that I'd go to bed early, around 8-9pm. My wife and the baby would hang out in the living room or the guest room, my wife perhaps napping as our daughter permitted. Around 3am, she'd come to the bedroom, put our daughter in the co-sleeping bassinet, and go to bed herself. Then, the first time the baby woke up fussing, I'd get up with her and take her to the living room or guest room for the rest of the night, until my wife was ready to wake up or (after my parental leave ran out) when I had to put the baby down in the co-sleeping bassinet so I could leave for work.
This way, each of us had a six hour or so block of solid uninterrupted sleep, plus opportunities to catch some additional sleep while the baby is sleeping.
Another piece of advice is to make sure you have several safe places to set down a swaddled newborn while you tend to your own needs, like cooking, using the toilet, and showering. A proper bassinet is ideal, especially if you're at risk of dozing off or will be more than a step and a reach away, but a pet bed will do in a pinch for places (like small bathrooms) where a bassinet won't fit.
Something I tell to anybody who is thinking about having a kid:
Some hospitals make you watch a video before you leave the hospital about not shaking your baby; shaking your baby, they explain, is bad. You should not do it. You will watch this video and think "I do not smoke meth. I do not need this video. This video is stupid. Let me go home and eat people food again."
And then at some point it's like 4 in the morning, you had a 12 hours shift doing pest control or some bullshit, with another one in the pipe for the next day, and the kid is SCREAMING. The little bastard is dry, has eaten, is warm, is actually laying on your chest and he's just, like, screaming is my hobby now, he thinks. This is what I am. I have found my ESSENCE. And it's like hour three or four of this, he's clearly just a bullshit person and you've never hated anyone more.
At this point you pick up the kid and realize something, and go "OOOOOHHH. That's when people shake them! I totally get it now!"
I'm not saying you will shake your kid. But I do encourage everyone to, like, recognize that the potential for babyshaking lives in all of us so they can better avoid it. And I'm using a joking tone here but I'm dead serious, there's just a lot of frustration you can feel in a sleep deprivation state that you want to be prepared for.
When this happened to me at 3am I told my wife the next morning and she looked at me like I'd cut the dogs head off. I felt very alone and ashamed. I am glad to read someone else has had the same experience. (I didnt shake the babe or cut off the dogs head)
Absolutely correct. The first time you feel that impulse can be pretty unnerving too, either then or later when you've cooled off.
Also there is a funny little book that's sort of about this, which sold a gazillion copies (every recent parent I know has seen it), and Samuel L. Jackson did the audiobook of it which is 5 minutes of your time that I cannot recommend enough:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDCqgHLX8Ys
Yep! Father of three, can confirm that this happens. It ALSO happens with some of the little freaks [1] at 2-3, when they rediscover that passion in anger rather than sorrow... it's astonishing just how infuriating getting the wrong color of juice can be. Mix that with a healthy dose of 'this is the third time this week I'm scrubbing your poop off the plaster walls in the middle of the night' and 'ah, you've suddenly gone deaf when I call you after two years of perfect hearing' and 'you... broke the timeout chair by throwing a fit in it??' and you really start to appreciate why some people beat their children.
Only it's not some people. It's you. And you're understanding how YOU could.
I got a great piece of advice from my mother in law for moments like this: it won't hurt the kid to be alone for a few minutes. If you're at the end of your rope, put them in a nice. safe. playpen, and walk outside (on a porch or around the house or whatever) for a few minutes where you can't hear them. They can scream or rage for ten minutes without you having to cope, and when you get back in you'll be ready to handle it again.
[1] I use this term with all the endearment in the world. I love the munchkins, even when they turn into little gremlins!
The best way to avoid doing something horrible is to realize you can.
On a deadly but less malicious note: I used to see, when forums existed, single men speaking with outrage at people who use mnemonic tricks to avoid leaving the baby in the (hot) car. If you aren't always fully conscious, you shouldn't be a parent, they said.
When we had our 2, my wife always put her purse at the baby's feet. I had a rule: there is never a time when the baby's in the car with the doors closed unless I'm in there with him. I don't care about proving I'm responsible. I just cared about them being OK, and the hell with my dignity.
It happens! You swear up, down and sideways you'll be careful, you'll be mindful, you'll never, ever do that thing - and then one moment when you're distracted with the tasks you have to complete and trying to plan ahead the rest of the day, you run into the store to pick up something fast and then realise afterwards "Oh God, what did I do with the baby/toddler???"
you should maybe turn this comment into a post on your blog to make it easier to link to. It is funny and it seems important.
+1. New father with a 4week old, this really spoke to me.
I've thought about it but I'd have to have some other stuff to group it with. It's not really long enough by itself.
Actually, it is easier to shake a baby than is often realized. Babies calm with bouncing. Sometimes it it takes very vigorous bouncing. And, if you start crossing the line it works even better.
I have two children and I like to have about 9 hours of sleep per night to feel good. My father is like this too. You definitely learn to cope with the interrupted sleep, even if you don't like it. We co slept with the baby, or slept separately in order to manage best. Both my wife and I were working full time.
Another option to seriously consider is adopting. I haven't done it, so can't speak from personal experience, but my last partner convinced me that adopting is actually a really good alternative to having biological kids and avoids the sleep deprivation issue (if you adopt >2yrs old, say).
I’m three years into my sabbatical and <6 months before I get back into the market so could do with a little more cash. Thus I’m interested in tutelage. I’ve done pro-content-creation for three and a half years before the sabbatical (I’m 26, UK based) so can teach anyone much about the skill(s) of videography/cinematography/editing/photography. I’m also an adept meditator having achieved stage 7 shamatha (meditative quiescence, and there’s 10 stages), so could assist someone who wants to get up to speed with that.
If you’re interested I’ll send you my work (for the content), and fees I’ll do at £40ph but if you can’t afford it we can discuss a more suitable price for you.
I think such a marketing post is tolerated here, but if not let me know and I’ll take it down.
Any questions or whatever. Throw em’ at me.
Just a question, what do you mean by sabbatical? I've only encountered that term in relation to taking a break from work (or maybe more technically, taking a break from your current work to explore other ideas). But taking 3 years off at 26 doesn't make any sense so it must have some other meaning.
Also, finally [for now], I spent, like, um, maybe 17 months of those three years pursuing [as mentioned in my comment] shamatha training, and I’ve also done lots of training relative to strength, hypertrophy, metabolic conditioning and nutrition/diet. Beyond that I’ve been studying philosophy for the most part, with some political science and economics too.
And it’s worth noting I’m a polymath autodidact, which might help you understand me more. Filmmaking and content creation is one interest of many, yet where I’ve, thus far, found my dominant market success and spent the most time in procedural knowledge execution.
And I took the three years off _starting at 23_ — I’m 26.5 now, looking to rejoin the market at 27.
Thanks for clearing it up. Definitely unusual to take a sabbatical so early in life and for so long, but contgrats on being able to do so. And certainly from a "knowledge/experience" POV, electing to take 3 years off to learn new things is much cheaper than paying a university to do the same.
The traditional sabbath is a seventh day off after six days of work. An academic sabbatical is something like a seventh semester off after six semesters of teaching. Three years off after age 23 thus suggests a career that began at age 5?
It does. Sabbatical [just like you said] in the sense of going to study other things (far out of reach of my current expertise/knowledge base, _but because knowledge is a unity,_ still impacting it). I’ll come back to market basically where I left off, but with a whole new ‘requisite variety’ which will impact my work in unimaginable ways [relative to my vantage point now {in time}].
Skimming the hivemind blogpost on Lacan, i am more and more convinced that lacan is, as someone else remarked elsewhere, a rorschach test - everybody read what it wants to read in it. Who guarantees me that the post is right and she has really truly understood what is going on?
Beside, i found the comparison with sapir-whorf telling, given how whorf himself was a master of motte and bailey statements such as "the hopi do not have time because they speak hopi"
Most people's writings do not function well as Rorschach tests. If somebody's writings do, I'm inclined to consider that a sign that a lot of their ideas lack structural integrity and are just complicated blobs.
To clarify in case of need, I was talking about lacan's, not octavia's blogpost
Did some meditating on the Zvi/Hanson/etc. posts on blackmail.
Here's a question that came out of it:
Does there exist rationally-hidden information (i.e. it would be bad for the person hiding it were it to get out) that is positive-sum to disclose, that is not and *should not be even in theory* evidence of illegal behaviour?
To put it another way, does there exist an act X for which a) revealing X is bad for the X-doer, b) revealing X is overall good for society, c) X shouldn't be banned?
I think that was the logic behind "outing" prominent people, particularly politicans, as gay back in the 80s. So-and-so is an MP who voted for the anti-gay bill, but he frequents rent boys and is secretly gay himself. Revealing this to the public punishes him for his hypocrisy and helps us work towards legalisation.
There was always a subtle element of threat around it, whether intentional or not; if you're in a position of power or social inflluence and in the closet, we'll probably know because someone will tell us like that guy you had late-night sex with behind a bush on Clapham Common. So don't vote against gay interests or at the least remain neutral, and we'll leave you alone, but fight us or support the anti-gay elements and we'll spill your secrets in the public view.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outing
I think it's reasonable enough to say that, as a general rule, blackmail is bad and should be treated as a bad thing. Are there rare exceptions where, owing to the particularities of the circumstances and situational factors, it might be justified? Maybe, but only in the same way that homicide can be considered justifiable in cases of self-defense, or theft might be considered justifiable in various emergencies. But almost everyone agrees that homicide and theft are still very bad things in general.
People like Hanson who try to argue "actually blackmail might be good sometimes" aren't being nearly as clever as they think. Even if it's kinda sorta technically correct if you squint, the "sometimes" in that sentence is doing a colossal amount of work.
I think blackmail is a slightly different issue to what the OP brings up. There are situations where it's perfectly legitimate to do either A or B, but not to condition your decision between them on C - for example, it's not OK to decide a tightly-contested hiring decision by asking one of the applicants to sleep with you.
Similarly, I think that there are plenty of situations where releasing negative information about someone is legitimate or even praiseworthy, but telling them that you'll release it if and only if they don't give you money should be punished - we're not trying to prevent the release of the information, we're trying to prevent the blackmail.
Oh, the question relates to the blackmail debate; it's a hole in an argument for blackmail to be illegal.
Nobody will bother blackmailing somebody about things that are positive for the blackmailee to have made public, so that's item 1.
It's negative-sum to incentivise people to discover and sometimes publish (to make their threats believable) things that are negative-sum to publish, so that's item 2.
And the benefit Robin describes of incentivising people to dig up other people's actually-dirty secrets can be handled by a bounty system *if* the information is evidence of a crime, which is item 3 (and allowing blackmail in addition to the bounty system would be bad because the bad person might outbid the bounty).
The easiest and most common form of this is "what a particular attractive person looks like naked". A lot of people would get a ton of utility out of, say, naked pictures of a famous actress who very much doesn't want them to exist.
Another example would be, for instance, that a particular person had a relative that misbehaved in some way unrelated to them. Or someone who maintains a friendship with a friend who is currently taking a dip into some kind of racism. There's certainly a lot of people who would want to know all these things about someone.
But I like the nude photo thing because, like, it's clearly net positive; there's going to be a ton of dudes who really enjoy those photos, and only one person who is broken up about them. And it does refocus that privacy is part of this - that we still all mostly value privacy in some pet situations.
I wouldn't consider the nude photo scenario to be a net positive at all. It's producing +0.0001 utils to all of the horny perverts who wanted to see them (who easily could've and would've just looked at pics of an equally attractive person otherwise, given the insane amount of pornography available on the internet), and -10,000 utils to the person whose picture is being leaked (who's just suffered an egregious violation of privacy and been subjected to an extraordinary amount of large-scale public embarrassment). Even if it makes literally *millions* of pervs infinitesimally happier, it still wouldn't be worth the trade off.
This is sort of related to something I got to later. First, we both agree that the horny perverts here should get near-zero consideration of their wants in the face of stealing something someone else owns in the sense one owns access to their nude body. We both agree it isn't worth the tradeoff.
What I'm trying to say is, yes, but there's several indicators here that you got to the right answer not by doing a utility judgment. These guys are horny perverts, she's suffered an egregious violation, and has an extraordinary amount of embarrassment. That's not dry utility language, that's already-decided-on-principle language. I'm guessing there could be infinity guys who liked the pictures pretty damn well and you still would think the violation was wrong.
Now say the pictures have been out for months and months, and there's a guy who wants to see them. He knows very much that she doesn't want them seen, but he also accurately notes that she won't know he's looking at them; her marginal disutility is zilch. We both (probably) disagree that he's wrong to look at them, but why?
What I'm getting at here is, this is wrong either way. But we can only pretend this is a clean utility judgement thing - that it's the utility that makes this wrong - so long as we can accurately measure a subjective thing. In this case, both you and I look at the perverts and go "Their enjoyment is subjective. But I'm going to judge it as extremely low , because they are the villian here".
In this case, that subjectivity is fine, because it's getting us the right answer. But most issues like this aren't that simple; say someone would prefer not to be doxxed, because they say it would put them in danger. Both the value of the dox (to everyone who would like to know their real name, or where they live, or whatever) and the risk to the person's safety are both things that the person judging the morality of the dox knows subjectively, not objectively.
If you have some solid anti-dox principles - i.e. you don't dox someone unless there's absolutely no other choice to preserve life, or something - then you are good here. But if you don't, if you are relying on a cold utility judgment, then you are just hoping that for the first time ever most people will be reasonable and unbiased when making subjective judgements about other people they may or may not like.
I'm not saying that my utilitarian calculation is the *only* reason I think leaking nude photos of people against their will is wrong. Simply that even from a strictly utilitarian point of view, the math doesn't add up in favor of the leakers.
Would that result change if there was some arbitrarily high number of perverts out there who'd enjoy the nude photos? For instance, if we lived in a galaxy-spanning society with quintillions of humans (and possibly other sapient beings who might, for whatever reason, gain enjoyment from seeing naked human women)? Yes, but I'd still say that leaking nude photos was wrong in that instance. It's like Yudkowsky's old thought experiment, where torturing one person for 50 years will prevent 7 trillion people from getting mildly irritating dust specks in their eyes for a fraction of a second. I'd choose the dust specks, because I don't think it's worth causing a great deal of harm to someone just to provide an infinitesimally small amount of good to a much larger group of people, even in situations where the math *does* actually work out for the larger group if you're just looking at pure utility calculations.
That doesn't necessarily mean that I reject utilitarianism, merely that my own utilitarian calculations are "bounded" so that trivially small positive values are ignored when trading off against huge negative values. (And vice-versa: I'm also inclined to ignore trivially small negative values when trading off against huge positive values, e.g. I don't think preventing the discomfort of racists who don't want their children going to school with black people is worth opposing the enormous utility that comes with desegregating schools, and still wouldn't think that even if there was a ridiculously high number of racists who were made uncomfortable by desegregation.)
Yudkowsky didn't use 7 trillion (given the description of the problem, 7 trillion would actually probably make the torture worse even for a strict utilitarian, since 50 years is 1.6 billion seconds and the dust speck is barely noticeable for a fraction of a second).
Yudkowsky used 3^^^3. Which is 3^(3^(3^(3^(...)))) where the *amount of 3s* in that tower is 7.6 trillion. The non-infinite guesses at the size of the *entire* universe (as opposed to the observable universe), while in some cases mind-bogglingly huge enough that given arbitrary point-to-point FTL humanity would run out of time before the stars went out before it ran out of space for exponential growth, are still far less than 3^^^3 (whether you measure in cubic Planck lengths, in atoms, or in cubic megaparsecs; stuff like that is irrelevant in the face of 3^^^3).
I'm not convinced the nude photos are necessarily net positive. The subject's negative preferences seem probably a lot stronger than any individual person's positive preferences; it's unclear to me how many people you'd need on the positive side to balance that out. I'd also guess there's a large number of third parties with mild negative preferences, from religious people with ethical objections to porn studios who'd rather not have the competition.
If the benefits are really so much greater than the drawbacks, why can't people work out some price point where the celebrity would *voluntarily* sell nude photos?
I mean, we have those price points, they do it pretty often. But some of them still opt not to; it's a choice they are making. Maybe it's a cold financial choice and they are just waiting on the right price, but it's arguably their choice to make.
The other part is harder, because it introduces some complexity that makes it impossible answer this kind of question in the first place:
1. We have Jane, who is famous but wants a normal monogamous sexual life she controls; someone sneaks pictures of her: she is very upset.
2. Her pictures make a bunch of people who make money off those types of pictures existing (TMZ, celebrity porn sites) lots of money and they are very happy.
3. Her pictures are instrumental in quite possibly millions of orgasms, many of them "net extra" to the world.
4. Some moral people are sort of upset about the pictures being stolen.
5. But before the pictures were stolen, a bunch of people were sort of upset that they didn't know what Jane looked like naked, and that was negative
6. Meanwhile Jane doesn't stay VERY upset forever, and she's just one person BUT
7. Jane's brand might be damaged.
8. Or it might do much better!
And so on and so forth. But for the sake of argument, imagine that every second of Jane's life would be measurably worse after the pictures were stolen. That's probably around, say, 16 million seconds. But imagine her pictures being out there were responsible for, say, 50 million orgasms. We can easily say the pleasure outweighs the pain here, if that's what we are going for. And let's imagine most people don't like Jane very much, at least in our bubble; we find it hard to have sympathy for her, because she has an annoying voice or something.
Whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible to imagine a situation where this is a net good. It's actually *really easy* to do it if you are motivated by hatred for the person - see people sympathizing with Lorenz for internet-harrassment on one hand while enthusiastically cheering a full-dox she performed on someone to punish them on the other.
But if you want like, a principled stance on this it's hard to get unless Jane has some basic right to privacy, some basic rights over herself, If she doesn't have these, then the only thing standing between here and a really, really morally justified peeping tom is how bad he wants it.
My impression is that the existence of such pictures means that a small but infuriating number of people treat her worse.
16 million seconds is about half a year. I think you misplaced a couple zeroes.
It seems implausible to me that the pics generate any significant number of net-extra orgasms. Most people who can orgasm from a picture can already orgasm as often as they choose.
You said "we have those price points, they do it pretty often". Could you clarify whether you meant "the average celebrity does it pretty often" or "it happens pretty often that at least one celebrity in the world does it"? I admit I haven't researched this, but it was my vague impression that only a tiny minority of celebrities do this--which is not incompatible with that second interpretation.
I did some stupid lookup thing on the seconds and didn't attempt to calculate it myself, that's just a foul on my part - retracted.
For celebrity nude scenes, they aren't tremendously rare; I don't know what semantic games we'd have to do to decide on what "fairly often is" but there's a substantial proportion of female celebrities who you can go, like, look up their boobs.
Yes, I know that people can masturbate without particular pictures. Presumably some of them would crank out an extra one, and some would have an especially fun one, or something. There's a reason search bars exist - people really do have preferences, etc.
But all this is besides the point. What I'm saying with all this, what I really did specify, is in there:
**Whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible to imagine a situation where this is a net good. It's actually *really easy* to do it if you are motivated by hatred for the person - see people sympathizing with Lorenz for internet-harrassment on one hand while enthusiastically cheering a full-dox she performed on someone to punish them on the other.**
Note that you sympathize with Jane - you don't think people should see her boobs if she doesn't want to. So your reflex is something like "fuck you there's no way a zillion guys could cumulatively want to see Jane's boobs more than she wants to hide them". But there's no way to quantify this well - that's why the zag to "whatever scenario you want to build, it's at least possible".
But in this case, a reflex hits: we go, wait, when it's someone we LIKE, things like privacy and violation end up trumping things like bare utility.
Lets throw out another scenario:
Jane is a nice girl who shares an apartment with a friend as she attends college. She is not aware that her roommate's boyfriend wants to see her naked, but if there's no question for either her, her roommate, or her roommate's boyfriend that she is opposed to this in a generic sense that encompasses him ever seeing her naked.
One day, Jane's roommate's boyfriend sneaks into the bathroom while jane is showering and takes several pictures of her, which he keeps. He shows it to noone except other people he also knows to be creeps; none of them know Jane and he doesn't tell them her name, so it never circles back. His relationship with roommate ends shortly after, and Jane never twigs on anything weird in his behavior. Several years later, he is bored of them and deletes them.
Jane has in one sense suffered no negative utility. J's R's boyfriend and his creepier friends get SOME utility out of the pictures. The utility here is "created", not "taken". And yet it would take a very rational rationalist indeed to feel OK about this. In another sense she's suffered at least some kind of loss, utility or otherwise - but we have to acknowledge that there's some value to Jane's wishes and some right to privacy to get there.
And then, say, we move to celebrities with leaked photos. It starts to be easier to say "Well, good chance she leaked these herself" and that was indeed some of the dialogue around, say, the most-recent-that-I-remember leaked picture scandal. And also celebrities seem a little less real to people - like they exist for them, to provide them with entertainment, and it's a little less of a leap to be willing to ignore this.
Now imagine if, say, nudes of someone like Majorie Taylor Greene leaked, or something. We'd expect to see much less principled resistance to leaked nudes and a lot more crowing about them than we would with an entirely sympathetic person.
This is getting super long, and I'm not trying to gish gallop. But what I'm trying to say is something like this TLDR:
1. I think it's pretty easy to make an argument that it's at least possible that a sufficiently popular leaked nude provides enough enjoyment to millions of people that it outweighs the distress of one person in cold-dry-utilitarian terms.
2. I concede that it's hard to quantify this kind of stuff; we don't have hard and fast distress-vs-sexual-enjoyment standards to draw on here.
3. It matters only a little bit, because what I'm trying to get across is that the it's much, much simpler to say "fuck that person, their right to privacy doesn't exist in the face of cold, dry, utility" when you dislike them.
I think 3. matters a lot, because utility is the easiest morality system in the world to cheat; you just assign enough utility to what you want to do to allow you to do it. And so, like, I've seen multiple places going "It was super OK to dox libsoftiktoc because there's utility in us knowing their home address and real name". And I'm pretty sure whether or not you think that's true - that it was fine to do, because utility - is pretty heavily influenced by tribal affiliations.
Sorry if this was super long; it's been a long weekend in a lot of ways and I'm pretty sure i'm not being efficient here. If it's not clear, I'm very much against leaking nude photos. But I think you have to consider at least SOME situation in which you are sympathetic to the person whose privacy is being violated so you consider the value of privacy at all.
As a general policy: If you believe your conversational ability is significantly impaired, I would much rather you reply to me next week when you're feeling better, rather than forcing a fast, low-quality response.
And yes, that was super long. And felt like you have several axes to grind, and you're more interested in grinding them than in replying to anything I said.
I think probably the most important part is that you have a model for how utilitarianism is supposed to work that seems pretty sharply divergent from mine?
My understanding of utilitarianism as a moral framework is that it's based on the assumption that each person has some "true" utility function that's not under their voluntary control; if something makes you feel unhappy at the -20 level, you can't just "assign" a utility of -200 to it instead in order to get what you want. One could argue about how closely this abstraction corresponds to any real thing, but that's how the abstraction works.
I think possibly you're confusing the moral theory of utilitarianism with rationalist *strategic* advice to maximize your personal utility, which isn't even attempting to be a moral system. (Though it's presumed that your personal utility function includes some weights for your moral preferences, if you have any.)
Yes, lots, obviously. For example, a couple I've seen (roughly - I don't remember the details) in real life.
:- "X has a recurring pattern of seducing young, vulnerable women and treating them shittily; do not get involved with them".
: - "X sells shoddy merchandise, go and shop at Y instead".
A corollary to the liberal belief that the threshold for banning things should be high is that there are lots of non-ban-worthy behaviours that are still severely immoral and that merit lesser sanctions, and warning people about them is almost always going to be part of that.
Most people would say that selling shoddy merchandise without the appropriate warnings is fraud (certainly it's literally against the law in Australia), so I don't think that clears the "the thing being revealed shouldn't be illegal" criterion.
The first one fits better though.
Nixon's White House recordings that came out during the Watergate investigation contain some examples of this alongside the actual criminal or criminal-adjacent stuff.
For example, it isn't and shouldn't be illegal for a high elected official to use ethnic slurs in private conversations with advisors, but it's generally damaging to that politician if the slurs are revealed publicly, and it's good for society for voters to know that such an elected official (especially if said official is eligible for reelection, which Nixon was not) is the sort of person who uses ethnic slurs.
That sort of gossip was one of the things I thought about when considering the question originally, but it's not at all obvious to me that the consequences of this are *actually* positive in the sense of resulting in better outcomes for the population.
Representative government has a failure state where the voters don't know what the government is *doing*, but ultimately some rude language that doesn't result in anything is morally irrelevant.
How is it good to know what kind of language an elected official says in a private conversation?
We had leaked private conversations where our top politicians were calling the citizens dumb fucks, said they'll be working for a bowl of rice, called our stance in foreign politics "sucking American dick" and so on. That made me respect these people more because this is how intelligent people converse among themselves on social issues! It would be really disturbing if even in private they still kept the PR charade, and I'd consider them some particularly alien species of psychopath.
On the other hand, it was a PR disaster for them because dumb fucks don't like to hear that they are dumb fucks.
I wasn't thinking of the vulgarity or bluntness.of the language as the problematic part. In modern American culture at least, habitually using ethnic slurs is a.pretty strong signal of animus against the ethnicities in question, and it's that animus which I think it's beneficial for voters to know about.
Your perspective seems to be that the politicians are being accurate in their disparagement of their own voters. While that may certainly be true for some voters, it's clearly not true for all voters. More importantly, we don't need to take it as a given that all politicians are lying about whether they care for the interests of their own voters. In fact, looking for clues about politicians actual beliefs is one of the core metrics many voters use in deciding who to vote for. Knowing that the politician who wants your vote actually thinks of you as subhuman scum is extremely useful information! They almost certainly will not do things to further your interests, if they don't even care about you or your interests enough to refrain from thinking of you as [disparaging term] and voicing that thought out loud.
Given the set I'm averaged with, I expect the politician to consider me subhuman scum, at least in aggregate. I prefer my politicians to have a realistic worldview, and in democracy they have to appeal to the median voter. If they do it without disgust, I don't think they are paying attention.
My secret beautiful meditating spot, where if it got out crowds of people would enjoy it, but it wouldn't be a peaceful spot for me to meditate.
Just about any negative information about a product. Or any other information that would cause some people to choose not to purchase that product. (Assuming the number of customers affected is larger than the number benefitting from the firm's profits.)
Trade secrets. You know a secret, more-efficient way of doing something, which lets you do it more cheaply and earn a higher profit. If everyone knew the more-efficient way of doing it, then the world would have less wasted effort and higher productivity, but you'd lose your competitive advantage.
(Note that this is basically why we have patents: they provide an incentive to reveal your useful secrets to the world.)
.
Also, the category of crime has this sort of fuzzy edge of trivial offenses that are too minor to be worth invoking the machinery of law enforcement. Like if you cheat at board games, or fail to do chores that you agreed to do. Formally declaring those to be crimes would have all sorts of practical problems.
But they're still, you know, misbehavior. You can imagine some hypothetical perfectly-efficient legal system with perfect knowledge and zero transactional costs where it WOULD make sense to consider those crimes (with extremely light punishments). It's only a bad idea because we're not efficient enough.
If the owner of a company is secretly donating money to politicians supporting anti LGBT-stuff. Or racist politicians. Or whatever politics you consider bad but don't think should be banned.
If a company that claims to be pro environmental is actually doing stuff that 'cause pollution. Or whatever way a company is hypocritical in ways that you don't think should be illegal.
I'm not so convinced that society would be better off knowing that some business owner donates to some cause I disagree with and that is unpopular. I think that that information might do more damage to a productive business and to the openness of society than to the cause in question.
Infidelity seems like the obvious example.
I certainly don't think adultery should be a crime, but it does seem plausible that people have, in general, a right to know if their partner is cheating on them.
This is another thing I considered before writing the post (I was thinking of Clinton/Lewinsky), but I do think that adultery should be illegal. I'm a libertarian, but this is in the same sort of category as perjury or desertion; it's not at odds with liberalism to be able to enforceably bind yourself to do X (no Western nation permits forced marriages, so it really is the person binding him/herself).
I get the theoretical libertarian argument for why adultery isn't a victimless crime, and it always seemed insane to me that adultery was decriminalized (at least in the sense of nobody ever being actually prosecuted for it, whatever obsolete laws remained on the books) for decades while laws against homosexuality were still enforced.
But isn't it the case that breach of contract isn't a *crime*, as opposed to a tort for which one can be sued? I wouldn't be averse to making it permissible to sue one's spouse for breach of the marriage contract (which is basically what divorce with fault amounted to, complete with financial penalties for the at-fault spouse.) Would you want to criminalize other forms of breach of contract?
Another point:
It seems highly unfeasible for the law to criminalize infidelity to a romantic partner with whom one *doesn't* have an actual legal contract. But most people, including myself, do believe unmarried partners can have a *moral* obligation of fidelity, and therefore a moral right to know if their partner if unfaithful.
My point then still stands, if one assumes that the blackmailed unfaithful romantic partner isn't married.
I mean, breach of contract isn't a crime primarily because it doesn't need to be in order to deter it and because the level of harm induced is low enough that the usual civil penalties i.e. monetary damages are usually sufficient.
In the case of adultery, though, a nontrivial percentage of the population would want essentially Shylock's contract i.e. "on pain of death" - the traditional Christian marriage ceremony, indeed, implicitly invokes the penalty of *damnation*. And allowing Shylock's contract into civil court would be a terrible idea.
There's also the argument from certainty of paternity -> birth rate, which would make society an aggrieved party.
So while I'm personally not entirely sold on it needing to be criminal, it's not super-obvious that it should be only a tort.
Your point about unmarried couples is decent, though.
"In the case of adultery, though, a nontrivial percentage of the population would want essentially Shylock's contract i.e. "on pain of death""
I'm highly skeptical that a "nontrivial" (let's say greater than the Lizardman's Constant of 5%) percentage of the population would actually want this.
Doing a survey on this in the current West would be kind of hard given that saying you'd want an adulterous partner dead can come back to bite you (either via a cancellation mob or via murder charges if your partner dies suspiciously at some future time).
But it's easy enough to point to the very, very long history in law (and present existence in some places) of in-flagrante-delicto adultery being a defence to murder charges and/or of adultery being a capital crime.
As an aside, are you and the other LadyJane the same person?
Same for other similar anti-social behavior. Lying is bad, I don't want it to be illegal for obvious reasons, and also if someone lies about something presumably it would be harmful for them if that came to light.
Wait, why should lying (intentionally claiming falsehoods to be true) not be illegal? I know that laws against lying are prone to being co-opted by authoritarians, but that invariably involves prosecuting people who were not actually lying.
To me the set of things which government should prohibit is smaller than the set of things which are morally wrong. As an example, I don't think the government should be intervening to arbitrate truth (in most circumstances).
The phrase "I like your haircut" is often untrue, but criminalizing it seems a bit excessive.
Congratulations to Hidden Open Aphorism contest winners timujin, Elisabeth Piper and Gašo, and thanks for all the pithy aphorisms and thoughtful comments!
الكلاب تنبح والقافلة تسير" (The dogs bark, but the caravan moves on) so I'm proud to announce the inaugural ACX Open Political Punsters contest, in tribute to the great comedian Volodimir Zelenskyy.
Prizes (well kudos) for the punniest political puns, with extra points for originality and brevity.
Your starter for 10:
- Why do anarchists only drink herbal tea? Because all proper tea is theft! (makes me so Proudhon)
Contest closes 8pm UTC Monday 4 May the force be with you and your time starts... now!
"Those birdie putts never seem to drop," complained the parliamentarian.
I was hoping we could do aphorisms cranked out by the stoned and drunk next.
To understand politics consider its root words: poly - meaning many - and ticks - meaning bloodsucking parasites.
In the schrodinger's cat Experiment why isn’t the cat the non-quantum observer?
Yeah any interpretation that relies on the concept of "non-quantum observer" is going to run into the problem of defining this concept...
Not an expert at all, but I think I can give three coherent points of view:
- GRW stochastic collapse: a "non-quantum observer" is any system that is big enough so that one of its quantum components will collapse its wavefunction (very rare, random event for a single particle, but inevitable for big systems). The cat is macroscopic so it is a NQO.
- De Broglie-Bohm pilot wave theory: no concept of NQO, no superposition. One thing happens, either the cat is killed or not, depending on some hidden variables of the quantum system.
- Everettian Many Worlds: no concept of NQO; the atom is in a superposition of (decayed + not decayed), the vial is (broken + not broken), the cat is (dead + alive), and anyone who opens the box will be (seeing the dead cat + seeing the live cat)
Hope this helps
Yeh. Great summary, thanks.
The Schrödinger's cat experiment is designed to point out the absurdities in quantum mechanics. The cat is a non-quantum observer from its own perspective, but not from the perspective of the researcher, which leads to logical inconsistencies. You can take it a step further by adding another researcher outside the room, for whom the first researcher is also in a quantum superposition of both sad the cat is dead and happy the cat is alive.
Palladium mag posted a joke article on April 1st that they're constructing a new techno-religion, that is better suited to handle modern life.
Are there any real attempts in that direction, by anyone?
The Sunday Assembly is pretty big in London.
Syntheism fits the bill https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntheism
Yes- it's called AI futurism (and most forms of Singularity-related futurism, frankly). Doctrow had his tongue in his cheek when he titled one of his novels "Rapture of the Nerds", but he was closer than he'd admit when he described the Singularity that way.
Scientology is that.
Some folks can't take a joke... L. Ron Hubbard would be turning in his engrams
When you tally up the ratings of the book review entries, it would be interesting to sort reviews not just by average rating, but also by variance. (Will we get to see average ratings for all or any of the reviews?)
seconded! 'divisiveness' seems to me a better an indicator of substance than mere rating, more so divisiveness in the eyes of this blog's readership.
especially given scott's reviews provide such a strong stylistic template to lean into, sorting by divisiveness might favor originality/experimentation/insight over those that ape his style to come off superficially as a "good" review
Yes, good idea!
Any mental health/psych types want to have a go at this one?
My wife: early 30s, hyper-conscientious, neurotic with history of intrusive thoughts. She's currently struggling with thinking back to a professional document she wrote and getting waves of anxiety about whether the information was absolutely correct and defensible in court (NB it is very unlikely to end up in court, and her job is not in law - the memo just had some legal implications). In general, her relentless searching for possible sources of fault and guilt, despite (or because of?) her life being very comfortable, makes her life hell.
She's considering which type of professional to talk to, and whether or not she should be regarding anti-anxiety meds as a last resort (due to side-effects etc.). She's seen a psychoanalyst once (ages ago) and was frustrated by their esoteric/lofty/impractical approach.
Any suggestions appreciated as to what type of professional to talk to and whether anti-anxiety meds are a slippery slope to another kind of hell.
If you are not able to find a professional to talk to that your wife accepts consider the book "Feeling Good" by Burns. It is a classic CBT workbook that many professional therapists will use when you see them. Self direct CBT has been shown to work basically as well as CBT received from a therapist. I have had both professional CBT and used the book. They both work if you stick with the practice.
+1 on the shrooms, they might help and shouldn't make it worse.
Don't trust anyone who'll suggest chronic use of benzos, regardless of credentials. That shit ruins lives and some psychiatrists give them out like candy.
+2 on shrooms. If doing it alone, as long as their is an intention set before that is around the lines of “I want to discover the root of why X is occurring and heal it” with the courage to explore any memories and narratives based off those memories, and having a guide, like you Sir [producing the comment] to help her reformat or re-jig the narrative.
In general I am pro-shrooms. But she's never done drugs and the thought of having a bad/weird trip is a potential source of anxiety. This may not make sense to seasoned trippers but it's not straightforward to simply suggest hallucinogens to everyone, especially anxious neurotics.
I could be a pretty good could guide for her, but the last time I did shrooms it was an "alright, that's it, I'm done" kinda trip.
Doing it in a therapeutic setting with trained professionals would definitely be the way to go. Oregon has legalized it, but I’m not sure what the current status is. I’m not sure the extent to which facilities are up and running.
On a related note, this just appeared in my Substack inbox: https://ravarora.substack.com/p/live-podcast-tomorrow-institutionalizing/comments?s=r
"Tomorrow at 3pm PST, I will be talking to Carson Kivari - director of psychedelic integration clinic Thrive Downtown.
It’s one of the few institutions I would say is truly doing “God’s work.”
Thrive is based in Vancouver, but anyone looking for a high-quality psychotherapist who knows psychedelics can book an appointment virtually.
Subscribe to Carson’s Substack for insightful essays on psychedelics and mental health and bring any questions you have tomorrow for the live show.
Time: 3pm PST / 6pm EST
Link:
Institutionalizing Psychedelic Therapy with Carson Kivari"
Check out Teal Swan’s work esp. the completion process.
What you're describing sounds like classic OCD of the kind called scrupulosity: hugely disproportionate worry and guilt about possible minor mistakes or rule violations. Some people's scrupulosity focuses on violation of religious tenets, but secular versions like your wife's are also common. I'm not sure what you mean by intrusive thoughts. If what you mean is that she thinks all the time about things like whether professional documents had mistakes in them, that's not intrusive thought OCD -- that's just a manifestation of the scrupulosity. People who suffer from intrusive thought OCD have thoughts they find repulsive or disturbing. They get into a cycle of trying and failing to push them out of their mind. The more they try not to think about them, the more they think about them (it's like "don't think of an elephant -- no, no, stop, do NOT think about that elephant!")
Anti-anxiety meds are definitely a slippery slope into another hell. So is drinking alcohol to quell anxiety. The meds that are most effective for OCD are antidepressants. However, antidepressants have substantial downsides (weight gain, sexual dysfunction). OCD responds well to a form of CBT called exposure and response prevention. I recommend that you go to iocdf.org, where you can find good general information about ocd, and also search for professionals by zip code. The professionals listing there mostly have specialty training in OCD treatments -- they're not just generalists who say they treat everything, including OCD.
Thanks - I wasn't aware that 'scrupulosity' was a thing but that's exactly it. By intrusive thoughts I mean, yes, the gross/repulsive ones - she used to have these but now it's kinda morphed into just being about guilt and error. Point taken re: OCD professionals.
Thankfully she doesn't do drugs or alcohol; and her baseline opposition to 'medication for the sake of medication' is fairly strong.
The fact that she has had 2 quite different problems, gross thoughts & scrupulosity, that sound like classic forms of OCD strongly suggests that what she's presently suffering with really is OCD, rather than something more neurotic like excessive need to get praise for her work. Highly recommend iocdf.org.
The problem with the rationalist community is they refuse to see the underlying reality because it can’t be easily measured with their tools. There has not been some sort of great shift in the chemistry of the human brain that requires all these pharmaceuticals to set it right. This is not a material problem requiring a material solution.
Rather, we are living through a collective spiritual crisis. This case is but one of many manifestations. For more manifestations, walk around any urban center, both on the streets and in the office buildings. We don’t need more of the reductive scientific materialist “solutions” that this paradigm caused. We need spiritual transformation.
I cured myself of addiction, depression, anxiety, etc., etc., through years of committed spiritual learning and practice. It was hard, but it’s the only way out. Everything else is just suppression and numbing of the spiritual despair at the root of modern man’s soul. Or what’s left of it, anyway.
I'll bite. What does spiritual learning and practice mean for you, on a day-to-day basis? Are you within any particular tradition?
I agree with your point but there is a lot of worth in stopgap solutions when you can't address things at the root, and that's what the OP is searching for.
I practice in the Theravada Buddhist tradition. It involves study, meditation, regular retreats, chanting at the temple, etc. Though really I consider myself an adherent to the Perennial Philosophy. Ultimately the form of the tradition is less important than being connected to one. Psychedelics also provided me with paradigm shifting experiences that set me on my journey.
I also believe a key to healing is recognizing the existence of spiritual realms and a spiritual order to the universe (like kamma and rebirth). If you’re stuck in the scientific materialist paradigm, I don’t believe true healing occur. It’s a dead end.
I'm not that far from you in certain terms(also Buddhist), but I see it entirely differently: assigning any intrinsic 'spirit' to the world is a mistake - however we experience reality in an emotional sense is in a way a choice you make yourself on some level, just like any question of perception is a property you assign to your model and thus one that you can override. Otherwise you're just habituating yourself to learned emotional helplessness and making your internal state dependent on that which you might not ever have control over.
That is, one can choose to see reality in rationalist terms and just discard any despair, angst or alienation as unproductive aberrations of insufficient focus and concentrate your attention on what you can physically change for the better for yourself and for others. Psychedelics only reaffirmed that for me.
I see. It's not entirely fair to label that as purely spiritual, given that the core practice is about increasingly skilled induction of altered states of consciousness - something that can help with mental disorders for pretty obvious reasons, and also takes years to get good at, regardless of your philosophy.
Scientific materialism is a dead end but the human mind seems capable of functioning regardless of surface-level beliefs - I've met plenty of "spiritual" people very troubled by issues they shouldn't be, and plenty of "materialist" people who gave no fucks and had very healthy outlooks.
I agree spirituality is kind of... self evident on psychedelics, and overall more adaptive in daily life.
Some things work for some people, other things for others. I think you are not yet cured of dogmatism.
Fair enough. Having been raised by psychologists, put in counseling and on SSRIs at the age of 8, lived in a household where everyone was on psych meds, and then transcended that whole paradigm with vastly superior results after an arduous spiritual journey, I am admittedly hardened in my belief that the modern mainstream approach to mental illness is bullshit. I also think it robs people of their human potential. But of course everyone needs to find their own path. I’m just presenting another possibility and another paradigm. Yes, I’m pretty sure I’m right. But I expect anyone reading these comments to weigh the possibilities themselves. I’m certainly not forcing my paradigm on anyone. But here it is. Make of it what you will.
Agree with you that SSRIs are way way overused. Giving them to kids seems crazy to me, except maybe in truly dire situations where everything else plausible has been tried first. Seems like a lot of docs see most problems as Prozac Deficiency Disorder.
I would at least try CBT for a few months before meds to see if it seems to be helping.
Your description is extremely similar (almost identical in every way) to something a close family member went through. In summary, it was diagnosed as anxiety, and Sertraline has effectively controlled it with no obvious side effects for nearly a decade. The path to current state (all is well) was difficult and could have gone very badly. Would be happy to go into more detail privately - lots of things I wish I'd known 10 years ago - if you like; you can email 0pedunculate at Gmail dot com.
(I am not a mental health professional, and I recommend your wife seek out professional diagnosis and help).
> She's considering which type of professional to talk to
Your description sounds very much like an anxiety disorder (eg OCD or GAD). I would recommend seeking a professional who has experience treating anxiety disorders with CBT.
> She's seen a psychoanalyst once (ages ago) and was frustrated by their esoteric/lofty/impractical approach.
All the more reason to seek out a therapist who practices CBT (such as exposure and response prevention), rather than a psychoanalyst. These are completely different things.
Regarding medications, I agree with what dualmindblade writes about SSRIs versus Benzodiazepines. They are completely different.
Another commenter has mentioned "primarily obsessional OCD." The consensus is that the cases sometimes called "primarily obsessional OCD" are really just "OCD in which the compulsions are mental acts rather than physical acts." What you describe as "relentless searching for possible sources of fault and guilt" sounds to me like "mental compulsions." Reassurance-seeking is another common compulsive behaviour in these cases.
Mushrooms. https://hub.jhu.edu/magazine/2017/fall/roland-griffiths-magic-mushrooms-experiment-psilocybin-depression/
I have been keeping up with the research on psilocybin for depression and other psychiatric disorders, and agree that it sounds promising. However, the studies that had impressive results gave subjects a couple of psilocybin trips, with professionals present, embedded in a series of 10 or so counseling sessions where subjects discussed the problem they had come for treatment for, prepared for their trips, then processed them. That's really different from just eating some shrooms. Also, I have not seen any studies of psilocybin for OCD. Have you?
There is reason to believe psilocybin could be an effective treatment for OCD. https://psychiatry.arizona.edu/news/psilocybin-and-ocd
There have been some small studies. More research, as always, is needed.
It is irresponsible to give such a glib non-answer to someone who is suffering, especially when helpful answers abound.
Are you familiar with Griffiths and his research? Nothing glib at all about this response. I'm simply presenting another option with pretty good evidence behind it. If I were the original poster, I would take a look at this body of research and see if it might be something worth pursuing. Rather than dogmatically rejecting it offhand due to social stigma...
Really depends on what meds you're talking about. SSRIs have their issues but they don't usually cause anything like hell, withdrawal can be hell for some but thankfully it's 100% avoidable with a long, slow taper, much slower and more gradual than the one your doctor will prescribe. They aren't psychologically addictive so risk is near 0 as long as you're willing to do the long slow taper if it becomes necessary. Benzos are a bigger risk. Most have no problem at all, but a minority find them irresistible, and they will strike down people you might not expect, say Jordan Peterson. Withdrawal can literally kill you and is said to be worse than heroin by many addicts who've experienced both. The long (like a year or more) slow taper still works but only if the person can be on board and resist temptation the whole time. Then there's a bunch of stuff in between. Doctors of course have some sense of this but they are biased, so keep that in mind, do your research and you'll be fine. Oh and psychiatrist, she should see one of those. They usually good about working around the patients concerns, if not just get another
Not a doctor... but was volunteering in mental health support. Seems like starting with a therapist would make sense. She might get referred to a psychiatrist for a potential OCD/Pure O (don't take my idle words as a potential diagnosis). It is also not bad to figure out if she had a childhood trauma (of which an out-of-proportion feeling of guilt can be a sign), which would require a trauma-aware counselor, preferably of non-Freudian persuasion.
Anti-anxiety meds are hit and miss, and often mask the real issues instead of addressing them, and side effects can be rather brutal and occasionally long-term, withdrawal is a bitch, but sometimes there is no other choice, so...
Agreed with this.
Jaynes has convinced me that almost all hypothesis testing, as it is currently performed, is ill-founded.
He also clarified something that I've been coming to for a while: the goal of statistics is *always* prediction, and if your model can't predict anything, it's worthless. This has been my problem with string theory/SUSY, and it's come to the fore of my mind again because of the Lacan discussion. Who cares what your psychoanalysis theory is unless it can make predictions about behavior, so I can adjust my own behavior accordingly?
Speaking past one another because vomiting theories is good enough for a paycheck is such an indictment of modern science. Everyone know about the social science replication crisis, but the Null Hypothesis Significance Testing paradigm is fundamentally flawed, and we base all of hard science on it too! Particle Physics is recognized as being the most stringent applied statistical discipline, but 2 weeks ago a result (W boson mass) was published that is fundamentally incompatible with previous measurements, so one or both sets must be wrong. Even the most preeminent scientists are failing to be precise enough to weed out errors, and my fellow statisticians are happy to keep on teaching STAT 301 to engineers and scientists. What's gotta give?
It may be that the goal of statistics is prediction, but science has at least three goals - prediction, explanation, and control. Two models that make the same prediction might be different from the other points of view. Copernicus was worse than Ptolemy at predicting positions of astronomical movements, but had a better explanation for why retrograde motion happened at opposition. Neither is great at control.
I looked into that and found “After trillions of collisions and years of data collection and number crunching, the CDF team found that the W boson has slightly more mass than expected.” Hardly the same thing as a badly constructed social science experiment that doesn’t replicate - rather this is experimental science proving a well regarded theory as wrong, however minutely (it’s remarkable that theory gets so much right).
I'd caution against concluding that High-energy physicists do hypothesis testing wrong. They are obsessed with accurate models and measurements to a degree not seen in any other science or engineering, and if your reading of Jaynes makes you think that they are doing it wrong, the fault is with you, not with them. Incidentally, Bayesian calculations are bread and butter of particle physics, and there is no easy way to improve on their approaches.
Specifically, the W boson mass being incompatible with the Standard Model predictions is considered to be quite likely due to the systematic error, something in the setup or the calculations that was not properly accounted for, and that is a leading alternative hypothesis to "we have discovered hints of physics beyond the Standard Model". This is what is likely going on with a number of recent apparent "must be new physics" measurements, including g-2 and the dark energy density.
In general, LW-style disdain for frequentism and feeling superior about Bayesianism is one of the unfortunate cultish ideas unrelated to how real-world physics is done. Even with the replication crisis, the issue is not methodology (one can easily replace p-hacking with prior-hacking), but the focus on publishing rather than on accuracy and repeatability.
On the contrary, I think Bayesian epistemology is one of the most important cultish ideas championed by the rationalist community and in a few decades people will quietly assume it was "obvious" and the way it's always been done.
However, I don't know if it's major advantages are to be had in particle physics, but rather in complex systems.
> Null Hypothesis Significance Testing paradigm is fundamentally flawed
It’s just that some people fail to understand what it is. There is a reason why a typical paper that may contain a few regressions spans 20-40 pages. There is context that you need to comprehend the result correctly.
Any particular work of Jaynes? I have his "Probability Theory" but it's in my category of "read when I have free time" which is basically the same category as, "When three foreign kings bearing gifts suggest I read it."
I agree that prediction should be considered much more central to the value of models (where prediction is interpreted in the correct sense, certainly including having the right degree of confidence), but I think there is a little room for "useful pedagogical models" and other things.
+1! Can OP recommend an essay or two from [0] where Jaynes argues that "the goal of statistics is *always* prediction," and where the critique of NHST is made?
[0] https://bayes.wustl.edu/etj/node1.html
Update on our ACX grant project:
I've learned a whole lot about real estate Mass Appraisal and gotten in touch with a bunch of really smart people with the relevant credentials, several of whom we've recruited onto our team. Apparently a whole bunch of new papers in the field were published just in the last 3 years, and it seems like there's a lot of room to move both the state of the art and the state of common practice forward.
What's become quickly apparent is that this project is mostly all about data. Luckily, we've been absolutely spoiled by the OpenPhilly dataset. They have more fine-grained data than you can shake a stick at, and the majority of our work is going to consist of cleaning and merging these data sets together, then using them to reproduce the best models from the last 3 years of papers. After that our plan is to publish a paper, publish the source code, and release all the data that's not encumbered by any licensing issues (which so far is basically all of it). We would also like to set up a public website to do "live ratio studies" where we will track ongoing sales and compare the values of those properties to what our model predicts, and take particular close attention to sales of vacant land. That way if our model sucks it will be super obvious and you can all make fun of us more easily.
I also did a general survey of the data landscape of the top 20 US cities. They're surprisingly good! Most cities nowadays have slick "open data" portals with all kinds of information just free to download. Philadelphia's is still looking like it's the absolute best, but quite a lot of the others are up there.
But the absolute hands-down WORST? Silicon Valley (San Jose / Santa Clara County), ironically:
https://twitter.com/larsiusprime/status/1520608678495367168
If you want data from them they're going to charge you $47,000, which sticks out like a sore thumb compared to everybody else's policies.
I mean, at least they *have* the data. But I can't fathom any reasonable scenario under which it costs that much to retrieve ~328 MB of data.
I've been involved in a few of these for commercial reasons. There's a lot of people who would pay a lot of money to be able to value houses based on publicly available or purchasable data. They've all failed, including big efforts from Zillow and Redfin. What are you doing differently from those?
ETA: Which is to say, they make an algorithm but then when they test it against the market they lose huge amounts of money.
ETA2: And if you succeed, I will gladly introduce you to people who will pay huge, huge stacks of money for it. But my default position will be skepticism.
Well, for one our goals are different. We are not trying to profit on the act of buying and selling houses. We are trying to assess values accurately enough to be able to improve on the status quo of property taxation, which is already in place.
Two, the Zillow case doesn’t seem to me to be as straightforward as you’re intimating. Have you read Matt Levine’s piece on it?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-11-18/zillow-tried-to-make-less-money
Three, our methodology is to test between three to six modes from the literature on our dataset: standard multiple regression, various tree based models, and neural network models. Each has tradeoffs we will explore and evaluate - explainability versus accuracy, for instance.
ETA: I really don't see how the "Zillow problem" -- even in the case that Levine's analysis were wrong -- is actually the same as our problem.
You seem to be asserting that we just won't be able to get the margin of error "tight enough" -- but tight enough for what? The failure state for flipping houses when you're off by even a little is very different than if you're merely assessing the value for the sake of levying a tax. Help me understand what your position is here because I'd like to fully unpack it and make sure I'm responding to the right thing.
My understanding is that the house flipping algorithm has to generate TWO estimates: an offer price, and a will-sell-for price, and it has these failure states:
- Offer is too low: you don't buy the house, lose an opportunity
- Offer is too high: you pay too much and take a loss
- Will-sell-for is too low: you don't buy the house, lose an opportunity
- Will-sell-for is too high: you earn too little and take a loss
If you're Zillow, a conservative algorithm can eke out a small profit fairly slowly (this is what happened according to Levine). But a serious business isn't interested in a slow modest profit, but the trouble is you can't juice the algorithm to be more aggressive without blowing out your profits.
The property assessment algo, on the other hand, doesn't have a distinction between offer/will-sell-for estimates, it just generates one value, and it has these two failure states:
- Too low: your tax is weaker than it could be
- Too high: you drive people off the land
The difference here is that as a property assessor -- erring on the side of caution is totally okay and actually what I want! As I mentioned in the article (image link here: https://gameofrent.com/content/images/lvt_85_chart.png) one way to consistently err on the side of caution with the assessment algorithm is to lower the amount of tax collected. As long as the tax is high enough, I get the incentives I want, and I can leave a decent chunk of land rents to the landowner and still massively improve on the status quo. And as far as I can tell the error tolerances for that problem are very different than for Zillow's.
Further, the actual policy proposal that's on the table for Georgists in most places is to collect the same amount of property taxes as we do now, but fully exempt buildings. So just shift the taxes on to land. In almost any municipality that considers this, this effective tax on land rents would fall WELL short of even 85%, probably being no more than 50%.
That gives a very big error margin to get the land values good enough, and feels very different from the laser-tight margins Zillow et al seek to achieve when they're trying to make money off of narrow profit margins on investments that put big chunks of capital at risk.
Did I miss something?
I'll respond to your edit with a longer comment tomorrow or Monday. It's a late Saturday here and I'd like to give this more intellectual firepower than I have right now.
For one: The goal doesn't matter. The method is the same. Whatever reason you want to value houses for you still have to value houses using an algorithmic method based on public data. Keep in mind, the alternative is a huge (and well funded) system of tens of thousands of people utilizing human judgment and local knowledge. That's actually a pretty high barrier. If you're just more modestly trying to supply them with a tool to help then I think that's more achievable and still admirable.
For two: Yes, I have. I've read that piece and several other pieces and, as I've said, I've seen the internals on some of this stuff. I don't think the article you linked actually supports your case. (I also have issues about the piece specifically and don't think Matt Levine knows what he's talking about.) Regardless, the issue is not high volume, high value, data rich markets. Indeed, it's been well known that limiting your markets (as Redfin does) is a good way to increase accuracy. Are you restricting yourself to urban centers? Even there, though, there were serious issues.
For three: The use and exploration of multiple models is not, in any way, new or unique to this attempt.
I guess what I'm afraid of is that you'll do a passable job and convince a state to adopt it despite not being all that it should be.
Prima facie it does seem like there is a clear difference between:
1) Trying to beat the market given a fixed tax rate
2) Setting that tax rate in the first place
If you want to argue that these things are fundamentally equivalent, you need some kind of additional premise along the lines of "market efficiency implies the current tax policy is at a sweet spot." I've never heard this principle articulated.
All of which is not to say that there is no conceivable justification to be skeptical of Georgism/LTV; risk aversion in particular seems reasonable. But I don't think that the Zillow/Redfin examples show as much as you are claiming.
I'm not sure what you mean. I mean that literally, I don't understand your objection. Could you restate it or elaborate?
> For one: The goal doesn't matter. The method is the same
I edited my above comment before you posted with a more in depth response, and in short I totally disagree! The goal changes everything! How could it not? I'm not convinced at all that the failure states and the error tolerances for these problems is at all the same.
I suppose I agree with you the error tolerances and stakes are different. But I think yours is smaller than a company's since you need to keep the will of the voters. And I think state power is to be wielded with much more caution than private industry. Do you think either goes in the other direction?
I think you overestimate the electorate regarding tax policy.
The Tories, who remain in power to this day, spent 2012 introducing a deeply divisive bedroom 'tax' (technically a reduction in benefits rather than a true tax) and getting mired in the metaphysical quandry of whether, for VAT purposes, warmth is an essential or accidental property of a freshly-baked pastry.
Meanwhile, the deeply silly stamp duty, levied on sales of real estate, still stands.
I would be surprised if they noticed that an LVT was marginally higher or lower than is optimal.
I think we need to do the math when we specifically talk about margins. How far off was Zillow’s error margin and how did that translate into putting the algorithm in the red?
If I tax land at even just 50% of its rental value I have a ton of headroom, and even more if I tax less. The hard failure state is if we overtax and drive people off the land. That’s bad and we shouldn’t do it and presumably what you’re afraid we might do.
One thing that might not have been clear is I’m not trying to make a one and done algorithm for the whole USA here, this is a limited case study with open published code and data and a front end website. And we are working with locals from Philly who know the area well.
I also agree state power has to be wielded responsibly. The status quo is the state wields its power already: and it uses it to tax buildings too much and land not enough and this rewards the wrong things and punishes the wrong things, and we can maybe improve on that somewhat without going full LVT, just by shifting existing taxes off buildings and onto land. And this tool can help any jurisdiction that has good data and wants to try that.
As for popularity, we have to deliver net benefits for the majority of the population or the whole thing never gets off the ground. I think a revenue neutral shift of property taxes into land can achieve this without invoking anything other than the bottom line - look, most of you save money on property taxes, you don’t get punished for building an accessory dwelling unit, guy who owns 5 parking lots smack dab in downtown is incentivized to sell.
Also - I am not a state! I’m a guy trying to build an open model anybody can use that’s not locked in a government or corporate vault, and that anybody can rip apart and improve upon and scrutinize and make fun of.
Has Scott written an article explaining the replication crisis from the ground up? Alternatively, is there a good, well-written introduction to the crisis from another author geared toward an intelligent reader who is wholly new to the subject? I’d like to recommend something to a friend on this topic.
This post by Alvaro de Menard is worth a read:
https://fantasticanachronism.com/2020/09/11/whats-wrong-with-social-science-and-how-to-fix-it/
Andrew Gelman has written a significant amount about it and often likes linking to this older post:
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/21/what-has-happened-down-here-is-the-winds-have-changed/
+1, this is a great post.
Math’s crisis is, weirdly enough, caused more by pre-publishing and the difficulty of retracting papers. Although calling it a “crisis” would be a pretty big overstatement.
Is it really the worst offender? Or is it the only social science with enough integrity to actually run systematic replications? Yeah, the results don't look so great, but Sociology (for example) does not even have results.
Yeah. My experience is that social science takes research methodology more seriously than any other field, and therefore notices it's mistakes more often.
Nah. Social science obsesses over research methodology because methodology is often all they've got. When engineers get it wrong, bridges fall down and airplanes crash. When physicists get it wrong, the bombs don't go off, the laser doesn't work, and the spacecraft misses its target by 5 million miles. When electrical engineers fuck up, we get blackouts in three states. When chemists and physicians screw the pooch, products have be recalled because people end up in hospitals.
Very obvious stuff. We don't have to worry that much about the purity of our methods, because objective reality trundles along and puts all our predictions and products to the acid test, and we're left in no doubt at all whether the end result (regardless of methodology) was right or wrong.
Who can tell whether the latest sociology theory about equity and justice, or the latest economic theory about monetary policy, is God's truth or a load of total bullshit at which students will laugh in 15 years? We don't even know what to measure to try to falsify these theories. So yeah we spend a huge amount of time debating whether the method was ideal, because that's all we can do.
For a lot of physicists, but not string theorists :)
Which fields would you say notice their mistakes less often?
https://statmodeling.stat.columbia.edu/2016/09/22/why-is-the-scientific-replication-crisis-centered-on-psychology/
Has anyone here used thyroid hormone (T3 or T4) for depression, or other issues besides low thyroid?
I know it hasn’t done great in studies, but I developed severe hyperthyroidism (Graves disease) last year and it essentially cured my acute depression and showed me I had been experiencing dysthymia and the like for years. Treating the hyperthyroidism made the depression come back in full force, which is when I made the connection.
My depression is now well-controlled through a combo of Wellbutrin and remaining slightly hyperthyroid (with my endocrinologist’s blessing)
I had depression a few years ago and recovered using mainly therapy and life changes (plus stopping drinking alcohol).
I later discovered randomly via a blood test that I am hypothyroid. Retrospectively the only symptom in the top symptom list of hypothyroidism that I have ever had was depression.
I now take levothyroxine. I haven’t been depressed since but I’ve changed too many variables to indicate any causality - I think depression is so bad it is worth using every variable you can find.
I've given thyroid hormone to patients for depression before, it doesn't usually work very well. I had one patient who responded well to it, kind of like you, but it wasn't the norm.
Were your thyroid hormones within normal range when you were depressed, before you were hyperthyroid?
Yeah, I had it tested twice in the preceding 2 years, once in each acute depression period, both normal.
It’s certainly the most positively life changing event I’ve ever experienced (as far as diseases go, Graves has been pretty awesome, even beyond the depression relief); it sure would be nice to know who the small fraction of the population T3 might do similar for is.
Yeah good q. I don’t have an answer, but I’d guess that it’s better a) for patients with ‘atypical’ depression (overeating, hypersomnia, etc. rather than the opposite presentation of anorexia/insomnia), and also b) I think there’s not much good research supporting it as mono therapy for depression (unless caused by hypothyroid). Most of the studies that find benefit to it is as an augmentation strategy, on top of another anti-depressants. Another feature is that low-dose t3 (~25mcg) doesn’t seem to work. You need at least 37.5-50 mcg to start seeing benefit.
(Of course all the usual disclaimers that none of this is medical advice. Especially when dealing with thyroid, you wanna be extremely careful. You can do lots of damage if not under proper medical supervision/monitoring)
Are there AI alignment groups / companies that are remote or remote-friendly for engineers? It seems like all the major organizations are still exclusively in-office (primarily Bay, although it seems like Conjecture is in London).
Perhaps not what you're looking for, but https://www.eleuther.ai/ is a distributed collective and they do impressive practical work instead of MIRI-style theorizing.
On the other hand, they won't pay you, or anyone, anything.
Interesting. It doesn't seem like there is much of a focus on alignment there though, unless I'm missing something; they discuss wanting to support alignment but it doesn't seem like there's actually work being done https://github.com/EleutherAI/project-menu/projects/1?card_filter_query=label%3A%22topic%3A+alignment%22
Alignment is certainly discussed a lot, though most of what they are doing is capability exploration. State of the art is locked down behind "Open"AI/DeepMind's doors, so they're doing a lot of parallel development to have modern AI systems they can reason about.
They are first and foremost an AI technology org but they're considerably more interested in alignment (and, well, openness) than the rest.
I don't have a good answer for this, but here's a mediocre one: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Br6MRY9mQG2b8hie2/do-any-ai-alignment-orgs-hire-remotely
Thanks. It's weakly reassuring to see that I'm not missing anything obvious, but disappointing that none of the alignment orgs have made the remote transition, given how much talent is now elsewhere (like myself).
(I would be sympathetic to the "in-person work is required for idea generation" argument if (1) I didn't hear so much about how AI alignment is engineer-constrained, not financially constrained and (2) AI alignment as a field was making great strides as it is).
(For context, I'm the author of that post.)
The current list of remote-friendly orgs that are at least nominally focusing on AI alignment seems to be:
Fund for Alignment Research
Center for Effective Altruism
Ought
Fathom Radiant
It might also be possible to get a remote alignment-focused role somewhere like Google (e.g. with a team like Google Brain) but I'm not aware of any specific teams like that which are open to hiring remotely.
Of those, Fund for Alignment Research looks like it's doing the most "direct" work on the problem, and CEA seems to be approaching the problem from a "supporting infrastructure" angle.
It's definitely possible that I'm still missing some options. There are a few places that I haven't listed even though they're on 80000 Hours because I couldn't find any explanation of what they were working on and how it was distinguishable from capabilities advancement.
Agreed, I’ve been trying to read up on it, but it seems like all the work/working groups are Bay Area centric. Does anyone know of any alignment discussion forums at less coastal universities -- university of Michigan, UIUC, Carnegie Mellon, etc? What about fully online communities for it that aren’t solely in the LW/Yudkowsky orbit?
I agree with those saying no upvotes showing on the thread. It makes things too much like high school. But I would like to be able to put in upvotes that only the commenter sees (I guess they'd see them via email). And I'd like to receive them, too. It's natural to want to know whether your comment hit home for somebody -- why not facilitate that? Seems like there's no downside.
The downside is that likes are addictive and can reshape your posting to what gets more of them.
I dunno -- maybe a bit. On the other hand, in an in-person conversation you can see the other person's reactions to what you're saying on their face, and of course in real conversations the person generally has to say something when it's their turn, and often will feel called upon to tell you about their likes and/or dislikes of what you just said. I think most us who are mature hold up reasonably well under those circumstances and don't get pulled into saying what will get approval, rather than what we think. So receiving a heart from an individual, or even a few individuals, seems to replicate real life conversation and its feedback fairly well.
Upvotes showing on the thread -- that's way different. That's like getting jeers or adulation from a mob. I agree that that's disorienting even to people who have their heads screwed on reasonably straight.
That is literally exactly how the system works with the plug-in. You should be getting emails when people use the plugin to upvote your comment, because all it does is un-comment-out the upvote stuff
Yes, I know. But very few people use the plug-in. Even I rarely do because I have to switch to a different browser to use it
Please no.... The Redditification of the internet is one of the worst things to happen to it after Reddit itself.
Other Substacks have upvotes though?
If you install a third-party extension [1] you can make and see upvotes. Very few people use them so you only see the tiny universe of us mutants.
(You can also upvote a comment that you get in email.)
[1] Pycea's is https://github.com/Pycea/ACX-tweaks. Mine is at https://github.com/EdwardScizorhands/ACX-simple but I'd recommend his unless you really like minimalist stuff.
Up & down votes are default substack functions, and Scott specifically asked for them to be removed, because they are *horrible* for viewpoint diversity. Source: every forum that has upvotes and downvotes ever.
AFAIK Scott only asked for the disablement of up and down-voting after a fair amount of discussion here. The general consensus was.... Disable!
Really ...why? I mean I guess I'm ok with it for the most part, since upvotes and downvotes, ratios etc. seem to be kind of a proxy for a popularity contest (though to be fair not that applicable in the "real world", since e.g. on Canadian Twitter the conservatives seem to get more favourable responses than the liberals, but that doesn't necessarily translate into votes...).
> seem to be kind of a proxy for a popularity contest
That, and we don't want people to write for the dopamine hit of getting a like, is exactly why.
Thinking people are chess pieces without agency that you can arrange as you will
I’ve heard it expressed as the law of unintended consequences.
https://www.techtarget.com/whatis/definition/law-of-unintended-consequences?amp=1
kicking the can? it's just doing the superficially popular thing, and leaving the mess for someone else.
Tangential to your main thrust, but for point one I don't think this is an example at all. Regan put forward rhetoric about small government but I've never once previously heard it argued that tax cuts where this type of brinksmanship. I'd be curious to see if you have any contemporaneous quotes or indications arguing this. While I think Reagan clearly would have viewed lower taxes as the moral thing to do a priori; the tax cuts were publicly touted and justified at the time as an intended boon to tax revenues based on the Laffer Curve ( see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laffer_curve#Reaganomics ) and 7/8 years under Reagan saw federal tax revenue increase, with the total increase beating inflation over his terms.
If he was trying to shrink government by starting revenue he clearly failed. There's maybe some argument to be made that GDP growth beat tax revenue growth by enough that the percent of the US economy that the federal government was directly controlling via purse strings/direct non-deficit spending decreased and thus government effectively "shrank", but the debt and deficit are clearly issues of increased spending, not decreased revenue.
Deficit spending clearly increased under Regan, but it already existed previously so there was no red line there that anyone could have counted on to not get crossed either. There's also no red line between what a sustainable vs unsustainable deficit is either. Not saying nobody could have been crazy enough to come up with or believe in such a scheme, but I would take some convincing to believe it actually happened in this case.
> Regan put forward rhetoric about small government but I've never once previously heard it argued that tax cuts where this type of brinksmanship.
I've heard, from a Republican who approved of it, that the point of the tax cuts was to "starve the beast" and reduce spending. Googling "starve the beast" turns up a bunch of stuff about this.
Thanks for the phrase to search and see comment above, I've definitely learned something and filled in a blind spot today. I've been frustrated for years with people trying to attack Reagan tax policy on spurious grounds, now I wonder how frustrating it would be to talk to a "Starve the Beast" supporter who likes Reagan after pointing out his policies certainly didn't decrease tax revenue...
"Well, if you've got a kid that's extravagant, you can lecture him all you want to about his extravagance. Or you can cut his allowance and achieve the same end much quicker"
Reagan should have considered the likely dynamic, and consequences, if the kid knows a loan shark who knows his father is loaded.
Fascinating, thanks to you and Bullseye for that information and phrase so search. Guess I need to increase my priors on politicians speaking out of both sides of their mouth depending on what they think their audience will lap up the most even more. And also reflect on how my bubble only fed me "Reagan was about the Laffer curve to increase revenue while lowering taxes" and not "starve the beast".
In retrospect if I didn't have the fore-knowledge that Reagan did make the Laffer curve argument at all I wouldn't be one whit surprised at "Starve the Beast" being a his position, especially with that turn of phrase. Searching now I'm especially surprised that I can't find anything talking about the disconnect here between these two viewpoints on tax policy from the same administration. This is also the era that brought us "Voodoo Economics" as a phrase and it seems it should have been particularly easy to win points for pointing out the, for lack of a better term, hypocrisy here.
Part of me is tempted to think that current general leading ideological opponents of Reagan-ish thinking would rather be able to claim that his tax policies led to deficit and debt so they push that perspective, whereas if they were reminding us of the starve the beast ideology it's easier to spin Reagan correct. I know at the end of the day the policies and agendas supporting them are more complicated than a single slogan either way can sum up.
Mis--incentivising?
A failed fait accompli? (though looking at the graphs, the debt accretion seems to have started in earnest around the great recession).
Strategic miscalculation.
That's good, but not specific about the kind of improvement which leads to things getting worse.
There's something about not being able to demand what you want, so you demand something which you hope will lead to what you want, but it doesn't.
You may be interested in this tangentially related article: https://slimemoldtimemold.com/2021/04/19/higher-than-the-shoulders-of-giants-or-a-scientists-history-of-drugs/
No specialist knowledge, but have sometimes idly wondered whether JFK had ADHD, and was effectively self-medicating with the amphetamines he took. I don't think he was seen as particularly ambitious or focused earlier in life, so if that was the case you could argue that his presidency was the product of a brief window in which amphetamine use was widespread, and if he hadn't been killed, his political career would have fallen apart as the amphetamines were withdrawn.
MacMillan, the British Prime Minister from 1957 to 1963, was a similarly late developer, who did retreat from public life after 1963 although he was still a relatively young and healthy man - though so far as I know there's no suggestion he was taking amphetamines while PM.
Modafinil is still OTC in India. And that works pretty well as ADHD (self-)medication.
Aren't most people diagnosed with ADHD kids?
Probably worked too, it's a shame medicine is so dead set against drugs that fix problems without making you also feel terrible.
Let me plug William James’ The Varieties of Religious Experience. This was an attempt to found a sort of science of religion. Spiritual experience being a nearly ubiquitous phenomenon, how scientific or rational is it really to reject so many data points and come to conclusions that better fit our own physicalist biases? Instead, James sought to catalogue and study these accounts (including his own). No one took up his project, or course. But a rational religion, to have any meaning, would have to account for the Transcendent in a way other than knee-jerk dismissal (e.g delusions or quirk of cognitive physical processes).
My understanding from friends who are Unitarian Universalists is that this is actually a religion that has managed to focus on the advantages of religion, general (such as community and the like), while avoiding most of the problems of religions, particular (such as weird metaphysics and hateful rules).
Yeah, but it's piggybacking on the corpses of two former churches - the Universalists who used to have a Bible and cross as their church seal, then a cross alone, and now they've joined in with the Unitarians who did away with the messy problem of the Trinity and the divinity of Christ - nothing. Well, the "flaming chalice" which looks more like a lamp to me than a chalice, and is certainly nothing to do with the Eucharist, either symbolic or real Blood of Christ. The current practice is very far removed from Jan Hus promoting the reception by the laity of the chalice:
"Many Unitarian Universalist and Unitarian congregations and organizations feature flaming chalice symbolism on their signs, logos, and in their meeting places. Some congregations light a chalice displayed prominently in their worship space while saying opening words at the beginning of weekly worship services. The texts used during these "chalice lightings" vary; some congregations use a ritual formula while at others these words are spoken extemporaneously"
The UUs had the shape of a church and congregations and all the rest of it from their history. They may have watered down the theology to the point where it's all water but they still copy the old practices of rituals. They didn't have to invent it all from the ground up. It's easy to "focus on the advantages of religion such as community and the like" when you start off with all the trappings of traditional religion and then just keep subtracting away "weird metaphysics and hateful rules".
Exactly. It started as two ordinary Christian denominations (maybe mildly heretical) one denying the weirdest Christian metaphysics (the Trinity) and the other denying some of the hateful stuff (ie that god sends people to hell) and they gradually evolved to get rid of the rest. But because they evolved rather than being designed self consciously, they seem to function more like a religion than many rationalist attempts to create one would.
But it sounds lame.
That's only partially tongue-in-cheek. I feel like a religion that couldn't launch a crusade to retake the Holy Land is also a religion that'll fail you in times of personal crisis. The fanatic zeal seems like both a bug and a feature, and I don't think they can be separated into something that is lukewarm and chill most of the time but turns into a rock-solid foundation and endless source of inner fire on demand.
"The fanatic zeal seems like both a bug and a feature, and I don't think they can be separated into something that is lukewarm and chill most of the time but turns into a rock-solid foundation and endless source of inner fire on demand."
You could always start a church devoted to worshipping MLOXO7W, Demon-Kaiser of the Domain of Meta-Balance. (https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/12/in-the-balance/)
First, you have to be very sure about what the "benefits" are that you want. You include "giving answers to difficult metaphysical questions that are beyond the scope of empiricism but nonetheless pressing among many people", but then go on about "supernatural falsehood" and the "sin of faith".
So what do you want? If you want empirical answers, then there is the scientific method to investigate the nature of reality. If you want a sense of community, following a sports team will give you that. If you want the benefits without putting in the work, you are like the other animals in the story of the Little Red Hen, who didn't help with the preparation but were willing to eat the bread once baked.
You can't do that. There are plenty of denominations which are willing to throw out traditional interpretations of Scripture and doctrines to fit with the Zeitgeist; the UUs as mentioned below are one, but there are plenty of liberal Christian churches doing the same.
You want to get people to come together, sign up to a code of conduct, agree on a standard of ethics, and meet up every so often to engage in mutual support and activities. Why do you need a religion for that? You can have it as games night with your D&D group. Or the rationalist Solstice festival.
Yes, let's become fit for the modern, industrialised age! Why, we have the spinning jenny now, unlike our benighted ancestors! And meanwhile, we still have the same problems of "For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do" and all the destructive impulses of the human heart.
What you are asking has been tried before, and is being tried over and over again. You can have as many ethical reading rooms as you like, but don't call that "a rationalist religion" because you'll end up with neither a religion, nor rationalism, nor any of the benefits you are seeking, because you can't have the loaf if you haven't sown the wheat and ground the flour and baked the bread.
"The eighteenth-century theories of the social contract have been exposed to much clumsy criticism in our time; in so far as they meant that there is at the back of all historic government an idea of content and co-operation, they were demonstrably right. But they really were wrong in so far as they suggested that men had ever aimed at order or ethics directly by a conscious exchange of interests. Morality did not begin by one man saying to another, “I will not hit you if you do not hit me”; there is no trace of such a transaction. There IS a trace of both men having said, “We must not hit each other in the holy place.” They gained their morality by guarding their religion. They did not cultivate courage. They fought for the shrine, and found they had become courageous. They did not cultivate cleanliness. They purified themselves for the altar, and found that they were clean. The history of the Jews is the only early document known to most Englishmen, and the facts can be judged sufficiently from that. The Ten Commandments which have been found substantially common to mankind were merely military commands; a code of regimental orders, issued to protect a certain ark across a certain desert. Anarchy was evil because it endangered the sanctity. And only when they made a holy day for God did they find they had made a holiday for men. - G.K, Chesterton, Orthodoxy"
I wonder about that quote. How many people respected the holy place because it was holy, and how many because they wanted social order and would rather avoid being hit?
After a few generations of some people doing the first and some people doing the second, is there even a difference? I'm reminded of Christianity used as a social contract in premodern times, as in "that guy is godless" being shorthand for "that guy is a sociopath, doesn't follow rules and will defect on you every time, avoid him". Hence at least surface allegiance to the Church was necessary for people to trust you at all. This also explains why so many wars were started over heresies.
The problem with a single religion is that most religions are unpalatable to certain kinds of personalities, unless you allow a very wide range of interpretations (which is how this problem was usually solved in practice). However, then the religion drifts into however the secular society around it wants to live anyway, much like Christianity turned into a mirror image of medieval politics.
Huh, if a single religion is good for the reasons you cited. (which I mostly agree with.) Then why is more than one bad? People in different places had different needs and traditions and such and so made different religions. Religious belief doesn't stop people from doing excellent work in the sciences. (I see science as the highest form of rationalism.)
I’m pretty sure Machine Interface was not trying not to contrast between one religion and multiple, but rather between the abstract concept of religion and actual existing religions. Using singular/plural to indicate that here is a stylistic choice that’s not really common in everyday life, so I’m glad you asked.
I know they literally say “Religion, singular” but I think it would be more accurate to interpret that as “a hypothetical (singular) optimal instantiation of religion, whatever that may be.” The plural usage is a little clearer.
I agree with you completely that ideally there likely would be regional differences in religion. And MI might agree as well.
Huh OK, thanks for the correction. So are you suggesting that MI likes religion in theory, but not in practice? In which case I say go taste more religions.
I mean, there's a couple reasons. But here's sort of the big ones:
Authority!
So, you go "hey, what if we could get all these good things religions have, in terms of community, or obligations to each other, etc.? But without any of the belief stuff, that stuff is real dumb, those dumb dumbies; I'm machine interface.
But then in the same breath you mention dogma as a negative - i.e. the part people believe is true *beyond them*, the part that they think is bigger and more reliable than their own reason. This implies, strongly, that whatever religion you think can come out of rationalism WON'T have this. Can't, it's dumb and harmful.
So then you decide, OK, let's make a religion of people that all come to a morality that seems to make sense to them based on their own reason, and enforce it based NOT on whatever fake deity's fake consequences they think they are (those fools, I'm machine interface) but instead based on what they can get outside of that - i.e., social standards.
And then you look around and find that's every non-religious or non-serious-religion on earth; we already have that, it's called just being an atheist. They just do whatever they think is right when they want to do right, and when they don't want to do right they are just constrained by social norms/governmental controls. Done deal, congrats, that's what you get when you want that, you can argue it's bad or good but we already have it.
So you go, OK, but, maybe the problem is not one of believing all the dumb stuff is true, but the PAGENTRY. Like maybe it's the having buildings to go to as groups where we think very hard about being good together, but also it's just sort of a general concept of good - we aren't enforcing a dogma, so we just have like six or seven platitudes about like respecting humanity and the like, being generally nice, but we all sort of tacitly agree that either there's no truth, or that if there is that we don't know it, or that if there is it isn't very specific in a way where you could ever build any rules off it. If someone tried to make a rule, you could go "offa me with that dogma! I have reasoned that this particular rule is bullshit, and my individual faith I've built for myself is separate from yours - do not infringe." And if anybody really tries to push it on you, like the community as a whole, you can just sorta call them assholes, because there isn't any actual, hard factual truth they could possibly be drawing on; You can disagree based on your own reason.
And you look around, and you find out we already have that - it's called Unitarian Universalism and it's, you know, we can argue about whether or not it's effective and makes changes in people's lives, but it already exists, that's what you get when you try that.
And so you go, yeah, but, like, social enforcement mechanisms aren't the only way. All of those are sort of voluntary things, like yeah a guy can just ignore social threats as an atheist, and yeah a universalist can just sorta ignore rulemaking besides really, really general truisms basically everyone believes with or without religion. But what if we did some work on it, and got a bunch of us together and agreed on a consensus morality, and then we got enough of us that we could enforce it in various ways? Like maybe with financial penalties, or forcing people to be socially apart, or something".
And then you look around and we already have that, and it's called government. And you can argue whether it's good or bad, but we already have it.
Now, all of this is fine if you are sort of just generically anti-religion in a sort of pedestrian reddit sort of way. But that's actually not what you really run into in rationalist communities the most; there's actually a ton of people specifically saying "religion has SPECIFIC benefits we want, that we've observed; we want those SPECIFIC elements of community, and can't get them ourselves, we've tried, oh god are we lonely/isolated/sad". And what they are asking for, those kind, is how they can get those things without believing any of it.
Or maybe I'm wrong about all of that, too. But if so, what the second group of people has to grapple with is figuring out a basic question: If it's not the supernatural that lets the dummies get the results they want and it's not belief itself and thus is "gettable" by the non-believer-, then what is it? It's not anything that could possibly have any authority over us (besides the government option) so what is it?
But it's hard to find out, because it's not like there aren't people thinking really hard about society and groups and how to improve them; they've tried a whole bunch of stuff already and all the low-hanging fruit is already gone. This general think-real-hard-about-things thing is called philosophy, and you can agree or disagree about how good it is, but we already have it.
As an ex-UU member, I want to say I really liked the UU church. (And then it got woke... or more woke?)
Yeah, and for the record I'm not trying to dig on it. I'm more saying, just, there's a lot of variation you can get, but most of it we already have in a broad-strokes way.
And it's also sort of true even for things that are built on belief, or at least nominally are. Like, want to try out just saying you are Christian but that's literally all you do? We've got that. 2 times a year? Got that. Want a religion where you can't kill bugs? We've got one of those. Do you ever feel like your gods don't have enough arms? We've got that covered.
Good take! So, what you say it's like: Problem: "How to build the perfect car for a/the rationalist (community)?" does not make sense as "There are cars of all sorts, already: fast, small, big, electric, farting-if-spouse-sits-down." -right? Seem correct, gone now for some cycling. ;)
Well, and very specifically for the "let's build a new religion, but without things that we believe exist in authority above our reason", it's like saying "We all know how gauche and stupid semi-trucks are, on account of their dumb bigness. I propose some kind of semi truck that works around this problem."
In that case, you first point out that there's a good chance people want the semi truck because of its bigness, that the bigness might be part of the appeal and function in the first place. But after that, you have, as you said, lots of non-big cars; all of them work for a purpose, but none for this purpose very well, and you have to ask why.
Something like that, anyway.
Thanks! I kinda lost that point. Right you are! (Finding sth. above *my* reason should not be too hard. Or below. Or. Rational Religion is kinda dry rain.)
Rationalism is not capable of creating meaningful religion. It has too many limitations and cannot escape its own hall of mirrors, leaving it unable to truly appreciate and encourage the divine.
Japan is only "not religious" if you insist on using a highly Western framework of what religion is. The Japanese state is still, by their own laws, considered to be ruled by a god-king and has no meaningful separation between secular and religious matters. Their state government directly subsidizes religious organizations under the guise of "cultural preservation".
And yet the vast majority of people in Japan still observe religious holidays in religious modes and perform religious rituals. They participate, quite literally, in pagan civic religion. This looks very different from being a Christian or similar.
Ah, yes, but here is the sticky wicket: Shinto is a pagan religion. Shinto does not require you to hold some deep, burning, fervent belief in the reality of Amaterasu-no-Mikoto or Inari-daimyojin or the Seven Fortune Gods- it merely requires you to accept the importance of a few specific concepts (purity and impurity, a certain amount of acceptance of the validity of divination, ki or vital essence exists and is important in some capacity, and of course life after death) and then toss some yen in the donation box in exchange for a fortune charm when you want to get top score on your exams or are worried about a promotion at work. If you're really into it you can go beyond that and have a priest bless your house and your car or have your fortune told or make a little shrine to your dead grandfather in a corner of the sitting room to venerate his soul, but those aren't necessary. Paganism is passive- it's just something you do because it's what people do. It isn't like the Abrahamic faiths, which demand active and near-constant engagement and that one center one's life entirely around the ideology. Therefore, systemic examinations based on a Western lens, which uses the Abrahamic faiths as their template for what religion "should " look like can't really capture or even conceptualize pagan faith in an effective manner. And indeed, the famous "basically everyone in Japan is secularized" studies fail FOR EXACTLY THIS REASON. They considered someone to only be Shintoist if they were on the rolls of a temple's membership. Membership in a temple is the domain primarily of priests and aspiring ascetics, so naturally this does not reflect the total number of Shintoists in the same way that counting only ordained priests would not reflect the total number of Christians.
"After all, Scandinavia and Japan, some of the least religious places in the world, are also some of the most socially and politically functional countries."
I don't know about Scandinavia; they have state churches - the Church of Norway, the Church of Denmark and the Church of Sweden are Lutheran, the Church of Finland (also Lutheran) was a state church until disestablishment. Yes, those societies are very secular and there's a lot of 'cultural Lutheranism', you might say; officially a member of the church but in practice only attending for weddings, baptisms and funerals. On the other hand, because there is/was one dominant church, that has left a mark on the culture that America, with its grab-bag of various denominations right from the start, can't replicate.
Japan also has cultural Shintoism/Buddhism; people may not consider themselves religious or attend services, but at the same time they'll engage in cultural practices such as memorial services for aborted children:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mizuko_kuy%C5%8D
So influences linger on in unexpected and novel ways.
> When will we meet god? When we die. It is the ultimate deference of truth, you literally have to wait until you die to confirm whether your theories about the world are true.
I don’t think this is quite correct. The judgment of God is deferred and for that you’ll have to wait. But God is “met” the instant God is let into one’s life. At least, that is what I would argue.
Give Directly do just that, and are one of GiveWell's top charities.
Here's a podcast interview with the co-founder. It discusses some of the pros and cons. I get the impression it is thought to work pretty great in developing countries, but wouldn't in a place like San Fransisco - though I don't recall them going into much detail in the interview as to why.
http://rationallyspeakingpodcast.org/263-is-cash-the-best-way-to-help-the-poor-michael-faye/
Edit: I suppose they don't give money to people "on the street" - they have various criteria they experiment with over time for who they give money to.
https://www.givedirectly.org/ is this idea, but for very poor people in Africa.
In theory, very poor people in Africa are much poorer than people you'd find in most other places. In practice, I'm not sure - they usually have a house and a small farm, and even though those things might be cheap, they might be in some sense better than the average urban poor lifestyle. It sounds like you live in a poorer country, so I'm not sure how that figures in.
According to random spitball figures from people who think about this a lot, on some kind of strong utilitarian framework the top EA charities (eg Against Malaria) are ~10x more effective than GiveDirectly. If you differ from strict utilitarianism somehow (eg you care more about making people happy than saving lives) that calculation might come out differently.
I think depending on your ethical system it's not crazy to think this might work.
Frankly, I'd put my money into malaria prevention and clean drinking water. The problem with giving directly to "poor" people is that you distort existing social patterns and arrangements, create suspicion and jealousy, and develop, in miniature, the kind of dependency culture that the aid industry creates at the macro level.
A friend of mine in South Africa (not particularly well paid university job) employed a gardener some years ago, paying him a decent wage. Then the gardener came to ask for money for his child who needed medical care. Then it was another child who needed money for books and stationery for school. Then it was a brother, then a cousin. And all of these were, at least in theory, genuine financial emergencies which could be cured by gifts of money. As a good former revolutionary and Marxist, my friend had some difficulty deciding what to do, since he was aware that by giving small dollops of charity to individuals he was effectively perpetuating the system, if not making it worse. But then as he said, what else can you do?
As someone who's actually been in a lot of the poor places I agree there's a subjective difference. A lot of Africa is in what I call functional poverty. The average person has food and housing and works decently. The big issue is when they need something their local community doesn't produce like medicine. Because they have nothing to trade with the outside world they need to rely on charity. And that often fails. But in a day to day sense they might live in a village but they're fed, clothed, and have basic dignity. They're not poor because something went wrong. They're poor because their country hasn't industrialized yet and poverty is the default.
This is in contrast to what I call dysfunctional poverty. My go to example used to be pre-invasion Ukraine. I need to find another but until then: Ukraine outside of major cities had issues with simple food distribution. Some people fell into absolute poverty because they used to get food and clothes and all that supplied in the old system. And that system collapsed and people were thrust into poverty by that collapse. They are poor because something went very, very wrong. In some sense they're better off: more cars, more roads, productive modern industry. But in another they literally had trouble getting food. (This was improving significantly post-Yanukovich. Probably worse now.)
This is why I make the point that different regions need different strategies for aid. Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else. Economic development like helping them found factories is the best thing you can do. Since I believe in export led industrialization that means helping African products to wealthier markets. And until it does that it needs some bridge help to prevent people from getting malaria or dying from lack of medicine. Ukraine, especially now, literally needs food. The harvest isn't coming in due to the invasion. They don't really need help developing port infrastructure or factories or export markets. Even in peace, they already have these things. Things that can speed the adaptation to the new norm would help too. But just introducing modern technology won't do much. (And some areas are mostly blocked by politics or civil society. But certainly not everywhere!)
To take a simple example: there are a lot of places in Africa that still use old traditional hand milling techniques. You can help simply by starting industrial mills and exporting to the west. (A lot of traditional African grains are non-gluten, by the way.) Ukraine does not need mills. It has mills. Lots of mills. They're a little less advanced than western mills I guess. But Soviet style grain milling is mostly fine. And they do export to the west already (and to other places).
"The cotton was high and the corn was growing fine
But that was another place and another time"
He shook his head real slow
And spoke with his eyes so can
This is another place and another time
"Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else"
This has been argued since at least the 60s, and was an article of faith both among the first generation of African leaders, and the IMF/World Bank. They persuaded African states to specialise in cash crops and raw materials for export, to generate funds for investment in industry and infrastructure. Fifty years ago, it was assumed that Africa today would be at least at the level of South America, if not Europe. African leaders wanted developed states patterned after the West, and thought they could be constructed quickly. The reason it didn't work, of course, was that raw material prices were deregulated in the 80s, and food prices fluctuated wildly. Oil also went up to levels that were undreamed of when these clever plans were formulated. So African countries had to indebt themselves to feed their populations, when previously they had been self-sufficient in food. There's some industry in Africa, but in most parts of the continent there's no chance of local industry competing with imported Chinese goods. Distribution is another huge problem, because the railroads that do exist mainly date from the colonial era, and go from the interior to the sea. Even today, most goods are moved around by sea or by long-distance lorries.
Don't forget either that Africa is becoming increasingly urbanised. Lagos, for example, has a population of at least 20 million, living mostly in slums without services or security. There are huge numbers of young men that the land can no longer support, and who are forced to travel to the cities to work so they can get money to marry. The poverty in some of these areas is indescribable.
Part of the reason Africa has to import food is a consumer shift off of traditional African diets onto more standard international diets too. For example, Africa now consumes much more wheat and beef than it used to. It's part of rising living standards in a region that has relatively poor soil for agriculture.
I agree that the cash crop export strategy didn't actually work. To do otherwise would be denying reality, imo. And I agree there's a lot of infrastructure work to be done. The issue being finding money to pay for it. I don't agree that industry has no chance or that it hasn't worked. Not only is Africa competing with China but China has come to Africa in search of cheap manufacturing labor!
The poverty in the Lagos slums is really bad. Whether it's worse than poverty in the countryside... I wouldn't say that. I'd say urban life, while it's more cramped and dirty, does tend to be better.
Though again, like in various Latin American slums, the issue seemed (to me) to be chronic unemployment. Not, as in the post-collapse Eastern Europe, literally that the entire food distribution system had been shut down. There were shops and all that. From my point of view, the issue was there was no consistent work and what work there was was low paying.
I've heard part of this story many times--the part about people migrating to big cities because they have to for economic reasons. It often goes along with a second part, which is that the migration of all these people to the big cities for economic reasons makes them all worse off than they were before. E.g., this is the standard narrative of the English Industrial Revolution.
This has always struck me as not making sense. Why would people leave the country in droves to go to a big city where conditions are worse? Especially when, with some major exceptions like the medieval-to-Renaissance enclosure movement, often they migrate to the big cities even though nothing has gotten worse in agriculture. Even if agriculture had been unsuccessfully modernized, people could still pick up the hoe and sickle and do it the old-fashioned way; the land is still there.
So this suggests 2 possible alternative interpretations of this general kind of migration to me:
1. People who migrate to big cities to live in filthy slums and be dirt poor aren't worse-off than before. They're better-off. Their poverty is just a lot more visible, instead of being hidden scattered around thousands of little towns.
2. Moving to the big city is buying a lottery ticket.
For young people, it's probably about excitement, opportunity, and sex.
Answer 2 is the standard answer given by development economics: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harris%E2%80%93Todaro_model
It's 50 years old so maybe needs some refinement but it certainly holds true in broad strokes in my professional experience in Africa.
I appreciate the link to the model, but I think it favors answer 1 (at least, as I meant it). I should have said "People migrate to cities until city and country wages equilibriate"; what I wrote focused only on what *starts* migration to cities. By answer 2 (lottery ticket) I meant that the equilibrium could be one in which urban wages are lower by average or median, but have higher variance, and people are overly-optimistic, so prefer the higher-variance lower-average wage.
This is in concordance with the observation that lots of working-class people buy lottery tickets, and also with the observation found in polls that most people think they will do better than the average in their peer group economically. It's at odds with the belief that humans are risk-averse, which also has empirical support.
People migrate to the cities because of the germ theory of disease. When six of your eight children survive to adulthood rather than just two, the land must be divided.
In the English case, it certainly didn't make sense. Effectively, people had to be forced off the land by laws and enclosures, accompanied by force if necessary, to go and work in factories. It was the only way employers could get a workforce.
Africa is so huge and varied a continent that I hesitate to suggest particular reasons, but some that I know of are: pressure on food resources with growing populations, caused in turn by lower infant mortality; changes in diet; changes in social attitudes and increasing restlessness among a better-educated youth; a surplus of young males unable to find wives; the lure of the city on smartphones that most Africans now have; the possibility, no matter how faint, of making it rich .... and many others.
My experience, admittedly an outside perspective, is 1. Urban wealth and rural poverty is a pattern in pretty much every society. You have more land in rural areas and so somewhat nicer houses. But there's more money to be had in the cities and more modern facilities. There are, of course, real changes like the square footage of your home gets smaller and pollution is worse and social fabric is more frayed. But there's also more money to be made and more freedom to non-conform.
Ideally, of course, the apartments would be decent and the wages higher.
In the case of England, some portion of urban movement was "encouraged" by the Enclosure Acts (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inclosure_Acts), which centralized land ownership and extinguished many traditional tenancy arrangements.
You might consider the story to be one of improving state capacity, where land ownership and control could be more regimented and centralized than in the earliest portion of the modern era.
You can also see how this process can happen voluntarily, even without coercion. If you imagine a freehold subsistence farm in today's suburban/exurban environment, it's to the current owners' benefit to sell to a more efficient agricultural concern and move to the city. It's a kind of lottery ticket, but it's a ticket that the migrant is paid to take.
> Africa needs to industrialize and modernize more than anything else.
Read up a bit on comparative advantage, and on some more advanced economics (specifically what is sometimes called "coordination problems"), in books such as Samuel Bowles's _Microeconomics: Behavior, Institutions, and Evolution_. And some ethnography, unfashionable as that is these days. McCloskey's _Bourgeois_ trilogy might be a starting point, although a somewhat elliptical one. And although Fukuyama's particular examples are perhaps badly chosen, his thesis in _Trust_ has relevance for development theory and practice.
Africa needs at least two things to change before it attempts to industrialize, in order that attempting to industrialize has a chance of actually reducing poverty.
First, for OECD countries, primarily the EU (because it is the closest large market), to stop blocking imports of African agricultural exports with tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quotas and extreme subsidization of their own farmers. Industrializing agriculture seems to be the path to starting manufacturing, and for that farmers need cashflow to invest.
Second, cultural institutions. In most societies, customary (automatic) behaviour is kin preference: having your idiot cousin with impulse control issues and a gambling problem run your business is *obviously better* than having a competent but unrelated-to-you person do that, because your idiot cousin is related to you. The exceptions to kin preference tend to be in the OECD.
This second problem both comes from and contributes to a zero-sum, zero-trust view of the world that keeps nearly everyone mired in poverty.
Without replacing kin preference with institutions that make trusting non-relatives the default, such as the rule of law, any successful entrepreneurial activity will be expropriated by local or national strongmen (those with the biggest kin groups), who then put their idiot cousin with impulse control issues and a major gambling problem in charge, with the expected results.
The knowledge that your society works like this, er, ...disincentivizes entrepreneurship. Or, perhaps, encourages people with get-up-and-go to get up and go to the USA.
The first problem may be solvable this century. The second...I have no idea how that might happen.
The EU is a major producer of food itself. I’ve never believed that Africa would ever be efficient in exporting food until it industrialises. Africa is a cheap producer of food because they earn so little, but this is farming inefficiency not a cheap labour market waiting to be exploited. In any case the EU, rightly, had tried to keep itself food secure. I personally think the recent deal with South America was a mistake.
The EU is a major producer of food itself. I’ve never believed that Africa would ever be efficient in exporting food until it industrialises. Africa is a cheap producer of food because they earn so little, but this is farming inefficiency not a cheap labour market waiting to be exploited. In any case the EU, rightly, had tried to keep itself food secure. I personally think the recent deal with South America was a mistake.
I've read up on comparative advantage and a little about development economics. I've read all your recommendations except the Bourgeois trilogy. If you have something to add about them beyond a book list I'm all ears. Because as it is, it seems like you're in a non-sequitur. Comparative advantage, for example, might be relevant if I was suggesting they stop producing what they already produce. But I'm not. Modernization and industrialization don't inherently mean direct competition with China.
I agree Africa needs to develop external markets. I said as much. And some of it is due to regulation. However, the US and some mid-income countries have notably opened up their markets to Africa. The reason for a lack of connection is partly regulation but its partly just doing the work of sourcing and moving goods. Now, states could do a better job of supporting this through infrastructure et al. But unless you can become president of some African state that's the best, you as an individual person, can do.
As for corruption and tribal loyalty that varies by location. In some places I agree it's more or less intractable. In other places it's weak enough to be overcome. In some places it's almost absent. As I've pointed out elsewhere, these places with strong institutions do tend to be richer than their neighbors but still poor by international standards.
"First, for OECD countries, primarily the EU (because it is the closest large market), to stop blocking imports of African agricultural exports with tariffs and non-tariff barriers such as quotas and extreme subsidization of their own farmers. Industrializing agriculture seems to be the path to starting manufacturing, and for that farmers need cashflow to invest."
The problem is that countries have very strong incentives to protect their own agricultural economy.
What you call functional poverty sounds like feudalism. Peasants got what they needed to survive; but without a cash economy, they had no way to buy anything non-local, or to accumulate wealth.
Maybe a big part of the reason they don't have mid-grade tech in some parts of Africa is that, if they're in a barter economy, there isn't any practical way for a company to /sell/ them anything. The free market won't work for them if they're not a market.
Feudalism is hardly a useful term for discussion of poverty without the essential hierarchy of lordship. There's no real material difference between the peasantry of a feudal society and those of another system with peasantry. The difference is at the top of society.
Note also that the classical model of feudalism allowed that peasants could, and in some circumstances (my go to here is England in the later middle ages) would become much more prosperous and access markets. It's very important point for Marx for example, as this is what allowed the creation of a bourgeoisie.
It depends on the region but West Africa, for example, tends to have the peasants owning their own land. Which is certainly a kind of historical economy but not feudalism where there are wealthy landlords running around.
It's not hard to sell them anything. The issue is simply that producing a farm's worth of wheat or bananas is good at provisioning calories but not as good at getting dollars on the international market. This is key to the whole path dependence/queue theory of international development.
On your first point, I think the best argument for giving to poor people in poor countries is not that they are worse off than the poor in rich countries but rather that a given amount of money goes much further. If I donate $100 to someone in a poor country where the cost of living is 10x less than the US, then that money would be about as useful to them as $1000 would be to someone in the US.
Depends what you're doing with the money. If it's just a question of pure consumption, what will make people happier, $1 definitely generates more utilons in a dirt-poor country.
But most of the big flows of money internationally are about investment, not consumption. And $1 invested in the First World actually does much better (for the investor and, ultimately, the world) than it does invested in the Third World. You give $1 to Katalin Karikó and you get (part of) a revolution in mRNA technology, that has already saved millions of lives and $trillions in economic output, and opened the doors to whole new fields of medical therapy research. You give $1 to a farmer in Nigeria and...he can buy a nice metal hoe to cut down the time he needs to spend weeding from 4 hours a day to 1. Very nice for him, of course, but the leverage is not even in the same universality class.
That's *why* the bulk of the international money flow is *from* poorer nations *to* richer nations. Because even people in the Third World want to invest their money where it has the best ROI.
I agree. I think these are related points, in that marginal utility of more money is highest when you're already very poor, but I guess you're right that there's a completely separate purchasing power issue.
I'll agree with other posters who said that median is likely a better measure than average. I recall something like 14 families owned pretty much all of a South American country (I want to say Columbia) at one point, meaning the typical resident was far poorer than it would seem using an average.
That said, I think you are badly underestimating how poor the US was in 1950, especially in certain areas. What we tend to see from the 1950s is far more polished and commercialized than what we don't see, because it's the music, movies, and other media that we can witness. We can't see the daily lives of the very poor. My dad was born in the 1950s, and grew up in a house with no electricity or running water, and it had dirt floors. This was in the southern US, and was not unusual for the area (that half of the state they lived in). There are many places across the South that were desperately poor at that time, in ways we would struggle to comprehend.
Where do you get the link between the 1950s US and prosperity? The media image seems to be focused on the growing middle class, not the experience of say a West Virginian miner or a black Alabama farmer, who were likely still dirt poor at that point. Less poor than the previous generation but not in the television-owning class
My mother's huge extended family in Oklahoma/Kansas lived through the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, then all the upheavals and rationing and whatnot of WW II, then in 1947 were directly in the path of one of the deadliest tornado outbreaks in U.S. history cause sure why not.
(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1947_Glazier%E2%80%93Higgins%E2%80%93Woodward_tornadoes )
As of the early 1950s they were living in circumstances which they and everyone else of that time considered to be working-class or the bottom half of middle-class, several rungs above "dirt-poor". And I am here to say -- with confidence because I am the family-tree nut and have in my possession lots of photos and letters and whatnot from exactly that time period -- that by any modern American's standards they in 1950 were poor. But they were far better off than what living in poverty in the U.S. meant in 1950.
I suspect a big factor in the link (real or apparent) between prosperity and the 1950s US comes from the rebound following WW2. Domestically, the US demobilized from something approaching a total war footing: by 1945 @bout a third of the adult male population serving as active duty military and a huge portion of the nation's industry had been redirected towards ear production, and after the war the men and industrial capacity were largely returned back to the civilian economy, greatly boosting both standard of living (compared to the wartime baseline people were used to) and ongoing growth in the civilian economy due to a catch-up growth effect combined with more resources available for capital investment.
Then there's international trade. WW2 devastated most of the most economically developed parts of the world due to large scale bombing and fought-over territory. This was compounded by other wartime effects: stupendous degrees of institutional disruption (ranging from kleptocratic to genocidal in Axis-occupied territories), tight blockades and widespread commerce raiding, and most major belligerents mobilizing their populations and economies to a substantially greater extent than the US. The net economic effect of this is that the US share of global GDP ranges from around 20% during most of the interwar years to a peak of 35% in 1945, and not due primarily to growth of the US domestic economy. As major US trading partners, particularly in Western Europe and East Asia, rebuilt their economies, US share of global GDP declined back to the 20-25% range, again not because of a decline or stagnation on the US side.
This catch-up growth in Europe and Asia provided two major benefits to the US economy. One was large and sustained growth in opportunities for gains through trade. The other is that Allied countries (particularly Britain and France) were able to make payments of their war debts owed substantially to the US government and American private banks and investors: not just lend-lease and other WW2 debts, but also the still-considerable loan balances left over from their WW1 debts.
The 50s were a period in which poverty significantly decreased for blacks precisely because they were moving out of the south and to northern cities where pay for industrial jobs was higher. A decent amount of that was happening for southern whites as well.
That's undoubtedly correct, but even so I doubt that the life of a (non-skilled) industrial worker was anything like the TV-produced image of the 1950s, which seems to be of a prosperous middle-class small town (no idea if these actually existed) without notable rural poverty or the like.
I doubt the life of the average American has ever been like what was on TV at the time.
You mean the Wire wasn't really a day-in-the-life documentary?
What do you mean, it is all lies?
Everyone's granpa wasn't in Korea and had their life saved there by extremely witty alcoholic surgeon? Leather jacket and greaser haircut couldn't turn a HS dropout auto mechanic into most coolest person ever? Later on, one couldn't run into comically interesting shrinks in bars in Boston or eclectic housemates in NYC? FBI didn't spend most of the 1990s investigating paranormal activity (which mysteriously never included extremely bright and long-lived collie who regularly saved farm boys and forest rangers out of tight spots for three decades?) Chemistry teachers don't cook illegal drugs and if they were, they are not caught in a web of crime and justice consisting of mob bosses, police officers, prosecutors, defense lawyers, P.I.s and random individuals who have more wildly varied and most interesting social lives than anyone you'd met, except possibly in hospital?
I hope Colorado has the most horrible problem preteens; that one must be reflective of real life.
Not sure whether they accounted for this, but something that immediately comes to mind is that a lot of real economic activity in 1950 US wouldn't have been counted in GDP measures due to being internal to an economic entity and hence non-monetised (e.g. childcare by parents, homemaking by wives, subsistence by farmers).
No, I could understand that, and it shows the limits of looking at incomes as a measure. You might have a lower income, but also a much more functional state and a narrower range of incomes (averages can hide some pretty severe spreads on income, including extreme poverty).
I'm not sure that average is a useful measure for this sort of comparison.
If a few people have most of the wealth, everyone else can be very poor indeed, in spite of a respectable average income.
IIRC, Inequality was a lot less in the 1950s than it is today, particularly in the richest countries. Some "developing" countries have levels of inequality that make today's USA look egalitarian. And the world as a whole probably has more inequality than any single country.
Jacob Falkovitch proposed that we should average over the log of everybody's income.
https://putanumonit.com/2017/04/04/ginialogy/
What we want to measure is average utility/happiness/whatever due to money, and studies on income vs happiness show that marginal utility diminishes such that it forms a roughly logarithmic curve.
I agree with Garett Jones that GDP is underrated in that many people carp on it, but nice things really do go with it.
On the other hand, official "poverty" statistics say Kiryas Joel is the poorest town in the US despite the lack of the sort of dysfunction you're interested in:
https://www.themoneyillusion.com/the-face-of-american-poverty/
Unfortunately, I can't find it now.
I don't have a great feeling for the 50s, but the 40s sounded materially awful enough that, optimistic TV shows notwithstanding, we might feel rather poor if we were to be transported back to their standard of living, even if they were happy compared to the Dust Bowl, war rationing, and notoriously poor Southern, Appalachian, and black populations.
I mean there were plenty of miners or very poor farmers in the US in the 1950s, so the left tail is probably pretty similar between 1950 USA and 2022 Mexico.
But overall, I agree that their narrative is overly upbeat. One issue that instantly comes to my mind reading your excerpt is how much they're relying on averages, which are dangerous. Medians are better, but ultimately the full probability distribution is needed to make any claims
Are you really sure that modern Mexico is worse than 1950s US? There are almost limitless measures you could look at, and I'm sure the motivated could cherry pick whatever they want, but... I just picked the first measure I could think of (infant mortality) as a sanity check and looked it up:
2022 Mexico infant mortality rate: 12.7
1950 US infant mortality rate: 31.9
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/MEX/mexico/infant-mortality-rate
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/infant-mortality-rate
Why else would the world get better? I don't think anybody is seriously claiming that 2022 is better than 1950 because we're so much wiser than we were back then.
Accumulation of wealth is one way.
I hope that last part is hyperbole, I mean, "USA is the richest Third World country" is a meme in Europe but...
Pretty funny coming from a continent with disposable income levels on par with actual third-world countries...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Disposable_household_and_per_capita_income
thatsthejoke.jpg
There's a whole class of life-ruining problems people seem to have only in the US, despite being amazingly rich on paper.
I'm very curious how you would know that. Considering there's essentially no online discussion about the vast majority of European countries (because they're largely irrelevant globally), there's not much to compare to - pretty much all online discussion is about America. Because of that, I would bet your perception is primarily based on common Reddit tropes like Americans not having healthcare, not based on reality (America has the best healthcare in the world when adjusted for health of the general population, we just have a lot of unhealthy people).
I talk to people sometimes.
It very much is. The actual worst part of living in the bay area is all the online rightwingers who've never been there confidently telling you what a terrible place it is to live. :P
Cost of living is high, but that's not a concern if you're making Google money, and other than that, it's a great place to live. In particular, it has some of the best weather in the whole country.
I'm curious where he went and what dysfunction he saw that would make him not want to live there.
Which decades are you talking about? I recall the current problems in San Francisco existing already in 1999, when California had mostly had Republican governments for the previous few decades.
I mean, they were already at a level that people would describe using the same vocabulary, about feeling like a “third world country” and stepping over passed out addicts in the tenderloin while housing prices beat out manhattan.